What's interesting is that you can already see the "AI race" dynamics in play -- OpenAI must be under immense market pressure to push o3 out to the public to reclaim "king of the hill" status.
I suppose they're under some pressure to release o3-mini, since r1 is roughly a peer for that, but r1 itself is still quite rough. The o1 series had seen significantly more QA time to smooth out the rough edges, and idiosyncracies what a "production" model should be optimized for, vs. just a top scorer on benchmarks.
We'll likely only see o3 once there is a true polished peer for it. It's a race, and companies are keeping their best models close to their chest, as they're used internally to train smaller models.
e.g., Claude 3.5 Opus has been around for quite a while, but it's unreleased. Instead, it was just used to refine Claude Sonnet 3.5 into Claude Sonnet 3.6 (3.6 is for lack of a better name, since it's still called 3.5).
We also might see a new GPT-4o refresh trained up using GPT-o3 via deepseek's distillation technique and other tricks.
There are a lot of new directions to go in now for OpenAI, but unfortunately, we won't likely see them until their API dominance comes under threat.
