The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b vs OpenAI: o3 ·OpenAI vs OpenAI

OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b vs OpenAI: o3 — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b profile OpenAI: o3 profile All comparisons
OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — OpenAI
Quality
#33 of 61
61based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#10 of 316
172.2
Output tokens per second
Price
#33 of 340
$0.07
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.04 · Out $0.17
Cache hit price
#25 of 206
$0.015
per 1M tokens (−59%)
Context
#238 of 345
131k
tokens (~200 pages)
OpenAI: o3 — OpenAI
Quality
#28 of 61
67based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#70 of 316
88.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#269 of 340
$3.50
Blended per 1M tokens
In $2.00 · Out $8.00
Cache hit price
#175 of 206
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−75%)
Context
#203 of 345
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b scores 61 and OpenAI: o3 scores 67 — a 6-point lead for OpenAI: o3. They share 2 published evaluations, with OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b ahead on 1 and OpenAI: o3 ahead on 1.

Blended pricing is $0.07 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b and $3.50 for OpenAI: o3 — OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is about 49.8× cheaper.

Throughput is 172 tokens per second for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b and 88 for OpenAI: o3, with time to first token at 0.7s and 2.7s. OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b accepts 131k tokens of context against 200k.

OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted); OpenAI: o3 is proprietary. 18 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Known Good Index 61 based on 3 of 6 evaluations 67 based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $0.07 $3.50
Output tok/s 172 88
Context window 131k 200k
Providers 17 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Known Good Index 61 67
Mathematics Index 89 92
Science Index 77 84
Reasoning Index 62
Agentic Index 18 60
Openness Index 60 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b · marker = OpenAI: o3 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond76 / 82
MATH / AIME89 / 84

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b / OpenAI: o3. OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b leads on 1 of 2, OpenAI: o3 on 1.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Text Arena 1,366
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,352
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Input $/1M $0.04 $2.00
Output $/1M $0.17 $8.00
Blended $/1M $0.07 $3.50
Cache read $/1M $0.015 $0.500
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Context window 131k 200k
Max output tokens 131k 100k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: gpt-oss-120bOpenAI: o3
Output tokens/s 172 88
Time to first token 0.7s 2.7s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

18 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b blendedOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b tok/s OpenAI: o3 blendedOpenAI: o3 tok/s
Cerebras $0.45 495
Groq $0.26 411
SambaNova $0.34 306
BaseTen $0.20 285
Nebius $0.26 281
DeepInfra $0.07 246
Parasail $0.26 207
Mara $0.30 181
Amazon Bedrock · first party $0.26 166
Together $0.26 111
Google · first party $0.16 85
Phala $0.26 82
DigitalOcean $0.17 62
Novita $0.10 42
CoreWeave $0.07 41
Mancer 2 $0.17 41
SiliconFlow $0.15 26
OpenAI · first party $3.50 72

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →