ChatGPT Tip via OpenAI's Noam Brown: Use o3!

I listened to the recent Latent Space podcast episode with OpenAI’s Noam Brown. It was, as usual for Shawn “swyx” Wang and Alessio Fanelli, a great conversation, among its topics the power of reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o1 and o3. I was struck by this comment from Brown:

One thing I’m surprised by is how many people don’t even know that o3 exists. Like, I’ve been using it day to day. It’s basically replaced Google search for me. Like, I just use it all the time.

I had experimented a bit with o1 when it came out, but found it slow and not appreciably better for day to day tasks as GPT-4o. That experience led me to largely ignore o3 when it came out, given that GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4 are so solid and keep getting better.

I took Brown’s advice, though, and used o3 to tackle two household challenges: buying a roof rack crossbar for my Subaru Forester Hybrid, and diagnosing an issue with a Thermacell Radius mosquito repeller, both tricky little problems. Finding the right crossbar for the Forester’s low-profile rails would have been a nightmare in Google, and even likely to trip up a smart one-shot model LLM GPT-4o. But o3 thought hard, using every bit of context I gave it, such as photos of the low-profile rails, and recommended solutions that checked out as accurate. When the Thule crossbar I had in mind was out of stock, it helped me find the Yakima equivalent, and proved to be a good shopping assistant, providing street prices and where-to-buy links. Big win.

The Thermacell Radius was doing a flash-3-lights thing when I tried to power it on, normally a sign that the unit is locked, but unlocking didn’t help. I was considering just buying a new one, but figured I’d ask o3 first. I gave it a photo and a minimal description of the flashing lights symptom. o3 thought for a bit, and responded with the unlock procedure, but also suggested cleaning the electrical contacts between the unit’s base and top lid. That worked! Another win.

So: start using o3 in (paid) ChatGPT—it’s a game-changer.