Microsoft has announced the release of its latest AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, now available on the Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Foundry and GitHub. These models mark a significant advancement in enterprise AI, offering improved reasoning, safety, and performance over previous o-series models.
Key innovations include multimodal capabilities, allowing the models to process and interpret visual data alongside text. Both models now support the Responses API and Chat Completions API, with enhanced features such as reasoning summaries—providing greater transparency into how decisions are made. Notably, they are the first reasoning models in the o-series to support full tool integration and parallel tool calling, enabling more complex and dynamic workflows.
A major emphasis has been placed on safety through a new deliberative alignment training strategy, which ensures models explicitly reason through safety protocols before generating outputs.
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Azure added new audio models: GPT-4o-Transcribe, GPT-4o-Mini-Transcribe, and GPT-4o-Mini-TTS. These models improve speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions.
This launch reflects a broader trend in AI toward more transparent, multimodal, and tool-integrated systems, empowering developers to build next-generation agentic solutions with greater confidence and control.
