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Microsoft has launched new AI reasoning models—OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini—through Azure OpenAI Service, available in both Azure AI Foundry and GitHub. These models represent significant advancements in AI reasoning capabilities, building upon their predecessors with improved quality, safety, and performance.
Key Improvements
The new models maintain compatibility with existing o1 and o3-mini features while introducing several enhancements:
- Dual API Support: Both models work with Responses API and Chat Completions API, with the Responses API enabling seamless tool integration and providing reasoning summaries.
- Enhanced Transparency: The models now include reasoning summaries in their outputs, offering greater insight into their decision-making processes and improving explainability.
- Advanced Visual Processing: o3 features enhanced vision analysis capabilities, while o4-mini adds new vision support—both models can now process and analyze visual data to extract insights and generate comprehensive text outputs.
- Comprehensive Tools Integration: These are the first reasoning models with complete tools support, including parallel tool calling, enabling developers to build next-generation AI agent solutions.
Safety Innovations
The o-series models utilize deliberative alignment—a training approach that teaches models safety specifications and trains them to reason explicitly about these parameters before responding. Both o3 and o4-mini incorporate advanced safety improvements while maintaining powerful reasoning capabilities.
New Audio Models
Microsoft has also released three new audio models available for deployment in East US2 on Azure AI Foundry:
- GPT-4o-Transcribe and GPT-4o-Mini-Transcribe: Speech-to-text models that exceed previous benchmarks
- GPT-4o-Mini-TTS: A customizable text-to-speech model allowing detailed control of speech characteristics
Moving Forward with AI Reasoning
The introduction of o3 and o4-mini models marks a significant step forward in AI reasoning technology. These models offer developers and organizations new opportunities to solve complex problems, create seamless workflows, and explore new applications of AI reasoning capabilities.
Interested users can sign up to access o3 and o4-mini in Azure AI Foundry today.
