Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
o3 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 70 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
o3's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 49.1 against 27.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Pro, 58 to 31. Seed 1.6 Flash does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
o3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $10.00 input / $40.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.08 input / $0.30 output per 1M tokens for Seed 1.6 Flash. That is roughly 133.3x on output cost alone. Seed 1.6 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for o3.
Pick o3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Seed 1.6 Flash only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
o3
69.9
Seed 1.6 Flash
54.5
o3
49.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
27.6
o3
72.3
Seed 1.6 Flash
73.1
o3
82.6
Seed 1.6 Flash
66.8
o3
66
Seed 1.6 Flash
47.3
o3
85
Seed 1.6 Flash
81
o3
81.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
72.8
o3
87.5
Seed 1.6 Flash
67.1
o3 is ahead overall, 70 to 56. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Pro, where the scores are 58 and 31.
o3 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 47.3. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 49.1 versus 27.6. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 87.5 versus 67.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 82.6 versus 66.8. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 69.9 versus 54.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Seed 1.6 Flash has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.1 versus 72.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 85 versus 81. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o3 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 81.1 versus 72.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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