o3-mini vs Llama 3.3 70B: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between o3-mini (OpenAI) and Llama 3.3 70B (Meta) comes down to three things: per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload. o3-mini costs $1.10/M input vs $0.59/M for Llama 3.3 70B; context windows are 200K vs 128K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.

Side-by-side specs

Speco3-miniLlama 3.3 70B
ProviderOpenAIMeta
Released2025-01-312024-12-06
Input price $1.10/M $0.59/M
Output price $4.40/M $0.79/M
Cached input $0.5500/M
Context window 200K 128K
Max output 100K 8K
Modalities text text
Tokenizer o200k_base llama-3

Capability matrix

Capabilityo3-miniLlama 3.3 70B
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
reasoning Yes No
streaming No Yes
tool use No Yes

Benchmark comparison

Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.

BenchmarkCategoryo3-miniLlama 3.3 70BΔ
MMLU general 86.0
HumanEval coding 88.4

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)o3-miniLlama 3.3 70BCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.003300 $0.000985 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.002315
RAG (4K / 500) $0.006600 $0.002755 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.003845
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.026400 $0.012590 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.013810
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.116600 $0.060185 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.056415

When to choose o3-mini over Llama 3.3 70B

  • Larger context window (200K vs 128K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
  • Supports reasoning — Llama 3.3 70B does not.

When to choose Llama 3.3 70B over o3-mini

  • Per-token input cost is 46% lower than o3-mini.
  • Supports streaming — o3-mini does not.
  • Supports tool use — o3-mini does not.

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