Thinking with images

OpenAI said on April 16, 2025 that o3 and o4-mini can process user images inside their internal reasoning chain, with native crop, zoom, and rotation actions. The post shows o3 taking 20 seconds to read upside-down handwriting and 1m44s to solve a maze and draw a path; it claims strong multimodal benchmark results, but the provided body does not disclose the scores. The key point is that image manipulation is folded into the same reasoning stack, not handed off to a separate vision model.

Why it matters: OpenAI confirms a meaningful capability step: o3 and o4-mini manipulate images inside the same reasoning process, so HKR-H/K/R all pass. I kept it below p1 because the provided text gives demo timings, but not the benchmark scores or rollout scope.