Dec 20 (Reuters) - OpenAI said on Friday it was testing

new reasoning AI models, o3 and o3 mini, in a sign of growing

competition with rivals such as Google to create smarter models

capable of tackling complex problems.

CEO Sam Altman said the AI startup plans to launch o3 mini

by the end of January, and full o3 after that, as more robust

large language models could outperform existing models and

attract new investments and users.

Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI released o1 AI models in

September designed to spend more time processing queries to

solve hard problems.

The o1 models are capable of reasoning through complex tasks

and can solve more challenging problems than previous models in

science, coding and math, the AI firm had said in a blog post.

OpenAI's new o3 and o3 mini models, which are in internal

safety testing currently, will be more powerful than its

previously launched o1 models, the company said.

The GenAI pioneer said it was opening up an application

process for external researchers to test o3 models ahead of the

public release, which will close on Jan. 10.

OpenAI had triggered an AI arms race after it launched

ChatGPT in November 2022. The growing popularity of the company

and new product launches helped OpenAI in closing a $6.6 billion

funding round in October.

Rival Alphabet's Google released the second

generation of its AI model Gemini earlier in December, as the

search giant aims to reclaim the lead in the AI technology race.