Head-to-head comparison across 2benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
o1
58
o3-mini
56
Pick o1 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o3-mini only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Knowledge
+1.5 difference
Inst. Following
+1.7 difference
o1
o3-mini
$15 / $60
$1.1 / $4.4
98 t/s
160 t/s
32.29s
7.12s
200K
200K
Pick o1 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o3-mini only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
o1 has the cleaner provisional overall profile here, landing at 58 versus 56. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
o1 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $15.00 input / $60.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.10 input / $4.40 output per 1M tokens for o3-mini. That is roughly 13.6x on output cost alone.
o1 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 58 to 56. The biggest single separator in this matchup is IFEval, where the scores are 92.2% and 93.9%.
o3-mini has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 75.7. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3-mini has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 93.9 versus 92.2. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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