Reasoning best Copy page Reasoning models vs.
GPT
models
practices When to use our reasoning
models
Learn when to use reasoning
models and how they compare to How to prompt
GPT models.
OpenAI offers two types of models: reasoning
models (o1 and o3-mini, for example) and GPT
models (like GPT-4o). These model families behave
differently.
This guide covers:
1 The difference between our reasoning and non-
reasoning GPT models
2 When to use our reasoning models
3 How to prompt reasoning models effectively
Reasoning models vs. GPT
models
Compared to GPT models, our o-series models
excel at different tasks and require different
prompts. One model family isn't better than the
other—they're just different.
We trained our o-series models (“the planners”) to
think longer and harder about complex tasks,
making them effective at strategizing, planning
solutions to complex problems, and making
decisions based on large volumes of ambiguous
information. These models can also execute tasks
with high accuracy and precision, making them
ideal for domains that would otherwise require a
human expert—like math, science, engineering,
financial services, and legal services.
On the other hand, our lower-latency, more cost-
efficient GPT models (“the workhorses”) are
designed for straightforward execution. An
application might use o-series models to plan out
the strategy to solve a problem, and use GPT
models to execute specific tasks, particularly when
speed and cost are more important than perfect
accuracy.
How to choose
What's most important for your use case?
Speed and cost → GPT models are faster and
tend to cost less
Executing well defined tasks → GPT models
handle explicitly defined tasks well
Accuracy and reliability → o-series models are
reliable decision makers
Complex problem-solving → o-series models
work through ambiguity and complexity
If speed and cost are the most important factors
when completing your tasks and your use case is
made up of straightforward, well defined tasks, then
our GPT models are the best fit for you. However, if
accuracy and reliability are the most important
factors and you have a very complex, multi-step
problem to solve, our o-series models are likely right
for you.
Most AI workflows will use a combination of both
models—o-series for agentic planning and decision-
making, GPT series for task execution.
Our GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini models triage order details with
customer information, identify the order issues and the return
policy, and then feed all of these data points into o3-mini to
make the final decision about the viability of the return based
on policy.
When to use our reasoning
models
Here are a few patterns of successful usage that
we’ve observed from customers and internally at
OpenAI. This isn't a comprehensive review of all
possible use cases but, rather, some practical
guidance for testing our o-series models.
Ready to use a reasoning model? Skip to the
quickstart →
1. Navigating ambiguous tasks
Reasoning models are particularly good at taking
limited information or disparate pieces of
information and with a simple prompt,
understanding the user’s intent and handling any
gaps in the instructions. In fact, reasoning models
will often ask clarifying questions before making
uneducated guesses or attempting to fill
information gaps.
“o1’s reasoning capabilities enable our multi-
agent platform Matrix to produce exhaustive,
well-formatted, and detailed responses when
processing complex documents. For example,
o1 enabled Matrix to easily identify baskets
available under the restricted payments
capacity in a credit agreement, with a basic
prompt. No former models are as performant.
o1 yielded stronger results on 52% of complex
prompts on dense Credit Agreements
compared to other models.”
—Hebbia, AI knowledge platform company for
legal and finance
2. Finding a needle in a haystack
When you’re passing large amounts of unstructured
information, reasoning models are great at
understanding and pulling out only the most
relevant information to answer a question.
"To analyze a company's acquisition, o1
reviewed dozens of company documents—like
contracts and leases—to find any tricky
conditions that might affect the deal. The
model was tasked with flagging key terms and
in doing so, identified a crucial "change of
control" provision in the footnotes: if the
company was sold, it would have to pay off a
$75 million loan immediately. o1's extreme
attention to detail enables our AI agents to
support finance professionals by identifying
mission-critical information."
—Endex, AI financial intelligence platform
3. Finding relationships and nuance
across a large dataset
We’ve found that reasoning models are particularly
good at reasoning over complex documents that
have hundreds of pages of dense, unstructured
information—things like legal contracts, financial
statements, and insurance claims. The models are
particularly strong at drawing parallels between
documents and making decisions based on
unspoken truths represented in the data.
“Tax research requires synthesizing multiple
documents to produce a final, cogent answer.
We swapped GPT-4o for o1 and found that o1
was much better at reasoning over the
interplay between documents to reach logical
conclusions that were not evident in any one
single document. As a result, we saw a 4x
improvement in end-to-end performance by
switching to o1—incredible.”
—Blue J, AI platform for tax research
Reasoning models are also skilled at reasoning over
nuanced policies and rules, and applying them to
the task at hand in order to reach a reasonable
conclusion.
"In financial analyses, analysts often tackle
complex scenarios around shareholder equity
and need to understand the relevant legal
intricacies. We tested about 10 models from
different providers with a challenging but
common question: how does a fundraise affect
existing shareholders, especially when they
exercise their anti-dilution privileges? This
required reasoning through pre- and post-
money valuations and dealing with circular
dilution loops—something top financial
analysts would spend 20-30 minutes to figure
out. We found that o1 and o3-mini can do this
flawlessly! The models even produced a clear
calculation table showing the impact on a
$100k shareholder."
–BlueFlame AI, AI platform for investment
management
4. Multi-step agentic planning
Reasoning models are critical to agentic planning
and strategy development. We’ve seen success
when a reasoning model is used as “the planner,”
producing a detailed, multi-step solution to a
problem and then selecting and assigning the right
GPT model (“the doer”) for each step, based on
whether high intelligence or low latency is most
important.
“We use o1 as the planner in our agent
infrastructure, letting it orchestrate other
models in the workflow to complete a multi-
step task. We find o1 is really good at selecting
data types and breaking down big questions
into smaller chunks, enabling other models to
focus on execution.”
—Argon AI, AI knowledge platform for the
pharmaceutical industry
“o1 powers many of our agentic workflows at
Lindy, our AI assistant for work. The model
uses function calling to pull information from
your calendar or email and then can
automatically help you schedule meetings,
send emails, and manage other parts of your
day-to-day tasks. We switched all of our
agentic steps that used to cause issues to o1
and observing our agents becoming basically
flawless overnight!”
—Lindy.AI, AI assistant for work
5. Visual reasoning
As of today, o1 is the only reasoning model that
supports vision capabilities. What sets it apart from
GPT-4o is that o1 can grasp even the most
challenging visuals, like charts and tables with
ambiguous structure or photos with poor image
quality.
“We automate risk and compliance reviews for
millions of products online, including luxury
jewelry dupes, endangered species, and
controlled substances. GPT-4o reached 50%
accuracy on our hardest image classification
tasks. o1 achieved an impressive 88% accuracy
without any modifications to our pipeline.”
—SafetyKit, AI-powered risk and compliance
platform
From our own internal testing, we’ve seen that o1
can identify fixtures and materials from highly
detailed architectural drawings to generate a
comprehensive bill of materials. One of the most
surprising things we observed was that o1 can draw
parallels across different images by taking a legend
on one page of the architectural drawings and
correctly applying it across another page without
explicit instructions. Below you can see that, for the
4×4 PT wood posts, o1 recognized that "PT" stands
for pressure treated based on the legend.
6. Reviewing, debugging, and
improving code quality
Reasoning models are particularly effective at
reviewing and improving large amounts of code,
often running code reviews in the background given
the models’ higher latency.
“We deliver automated AI Code Reviews on
platforms like GitHub and GitLab. While code
review process is not inherently latency-
sensitive, it does require understanding the
code diffs across multiple files. This is where o1
really shines—it's able to reliably detect minor
changes to a codebase that could be missed
by a human reviewer. We were able to increase
product conversion rates by 3x after switching
to o-series models.”
—CodeRabbit, AI code review startup
While GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini may be better
designed for writing code with their lower latency,
we’ve also seen o3-mini spike on code production
for use cases that are slightly less latency-sensitive.
“o3-mini consistently produces high-quality,
conclusive code, and very frequently arrives at
the correct solution when the problem is well-
defined, even for very challenging coding tasks.
While other models may only be useful for
small-scale, quick code iterations, o3-mini
excels at planning and executing complex
software design systems.”
—Windsurf, collaborative agentic AI-powered
IDE, built by Codeium
7. Evaluation and benchmarking for
other model responses
We’ve also seen reasoning models do well in
benchmarking and evaluating other model
responses. Data validation is important for ensuring
dataset quality and reliability, especially in sensitive
fields like healthcare. Traditional validation methods
use predefined rules and patterns, but advanced
models like o1 and o3-mini can understand context
and reason about data for a more flexible and
intelligent approach to validation.
"Many customers use LLM-as-a-judge as part
of their eval process in Braintrust. For example,
a healthcare company might summarize
patient questions using a workhorse model like
gpt-4o, then assess the summary quality with
o1. One Braintrust customer saw the F1 score of
a judge go from 0.12 with 4o to 0.74 with o1! In
these use cases, they’ve found o1’s reasoning
to be a game-changer in finding nuanced
differences in completions, for the hardest and
most complex grading tasks."
—Braintrust, AI evals platform
How to prompt reasoning
models effectively
These models perform best with straightforward
prompts. Some prompt engineering techniques, like
instructing the model to "think step by step," may
not enhance performance (and can sometimes
hinder it). See best practices below, or get started
with prompt examples.
Developer messages are the new system
messages: Starting with o1-2024-12-17 ,
reasoning models support developer messages
rather than system messages, to align with the
chain of command behavior described in the
model spec.
Keep prompts simple and direct: The models
excel at understanding and responding to brief,
clear instructions.
Avoid chain-of-thought prompts: Since these
models perform reasoning internally, prompting
them to "think step by step" or "explain your
reasoning" is unnecessary.
Use delimiters for clarity: Use delimiters like
markdown, XML tags, and section titles to
clearly indicate distinct parts of the input,
helping the model interpret different sections
appropriately.
Try zero shot first, then few shot if needed:
Reasoning models often don't need few-shot
examples to produce good results, so try to
write prompts without examples first. If you
have more complex requirements for your
desired output, it may help to include a few
examples of inputs and desired outputs in your
prompt. Just ensure that the examples align
very closely with your prompt instructions, as
discrepancies between the two may produce
poor results.
Provide specific guidelines: If there are ways
you explicitly want to constrain the model's
response (like "propose a solution with a
budget under $500"), explicitly outline those
constraints in the prompt.
Be very specific about your end goal: In your
instructions, try to give very specific
parameters for a successful response, and
encourage the model to keep reasoning and
iterating until it matches your success criteria.
Markdown formatting: Starting with
o1-2024-12-17 , reasoning models in the API
will avoid generating responses with markdown
formatting. To signal to the model when you do
want markdown formatting in the response,
include the string Formatting re-enabled
on the first line of your developer message.
Other resources
For more inspiration, visit the OpenAI Cookbook,
which contains example code and links to third-
party resources, or learn more about our models
and reasoning capabilities:
Meet the models
Reasoning guide
How to use reasoning for validation
Video course: Reasoning with o1
Papers on advanced prompting to improve
reasoning
