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Aya Expanse 8B vs o3-mini

A complete head-to-head: pricing, context window, benchmarks, modality coverage, and openness, with a programmatic verdict synthesized from the underlying data.

Updated

Aya Expanse 8B specs · o3-mini specs
Verdict by category
  • Priceo3-mini

    o3-mini publishes pricing ($4.40 / 1M output tokens) while Aya Expanse 8B does not.

  • Context windowo3-mini

    o3-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 8.2K, 24.4× the room for long documents and codebases.

  • BenchmarksTie

    No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores.

  • ModalitiesTie

    Both handle text.

  • OpennessAya Expanse 8B

    Aya Expanse 8B ships open weights (CC-BY-NC 4.0); o3-mini is API-only.

On balance o3-mini edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Aya Expanse 8B's 1. o3-mini publishes pricing ($4.40 / 1M output tokens) while Aya Expanse 8B does not. o3-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 8.2K, 24.4× the room for long documents and codebases.

No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores. Both target the same set of modalities (text), so the deciding factors are price, context, and raw quality. Aya Expanse 8B ships open weights (CC-BY-NC 4.0); o3-mini is API-only.

o3-mini is the newer of the two, released 3 months after Aya Expanse 8B, which usually means a more recent knowledge cutoff and updated safety post-training. Aya Expanse 8B is usually picked for multilingual and translation workloads, while o3-mini sees more deployments in reasoning and math. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.

Side-by-side specs

SpecAya Expanse 8Bo3-mini
ProviderCohereOpenAI
ReleasedOct 2024Jan 2025
Modalitiestexttext
Context window8.2K tokens200K tokens
Max output,,
Input · 1MPricing not published$1.10 / 1M tokens
Output · 1MPricing not published$4.40 / 1M tokens
Knowledge cutoff,2023-10
Open weightsYes (CC-BY-NC 4.0)No
API availableYesYes

Pricing at scale

What you'd actually pay at typical workloads. Numbers come from each model's published per-million-token rates.

  • Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day, vs $9.90
  • Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day, vs $99.00
  • RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day, vs $191

Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates).

Price calculator

Estimated spend for the listed models at your usage. Numbers are derived from each model's published per-million-token rates.

  • Aya Expanse 8BPricing unavailable
  • o3-mini$0.330

Benchmarks compared

Only sourced numbers. Where a benchmark is missing for one model we show the available value rather than fabricating the other.

Aya Expanse 8Bo3-mini
  • GPQA,79.7
Pick Aya Expanse 8B if

Aya Expanse 8B fits when…

  • Multilingual at small size
  • Strong cross-lingual transfer
  • Efficient on commodity GPUs
  • Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (CC-BY-NC 4.0).
Pick o3-mini if

o3-mini fits when…

  • Reasoning at mid-tier cost
  • Fast for a thinking model
  • Long-context tasks, handles 200K tokens vs 8.2K for Aya Expanse 8B.
Don't want either?

Consider Command R+ (08-2024)

Cohere's flagship optimized for RAG and tool use in enterprise settings.

See Command R+ (08-2024) specsAya Expanse 8B vs Command R+ (08-2024)o3-mini vs Command R+ (08-2024)

Frequently asked

  • Is Aya Expanse 8B or o3-mini cheaper?
    Per-token pricing isn't published for at least one of these models, check each model's spec page for current rates.
  • Which has the larger context window?
    o3-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 8.2K for Aya Expanse 8B.
  • Is Aya Expanse 8B or o3-mini better for coding?
    Both Aya Expanse 8B and o3-mini are competitive on coding benchmarks. See each model's individual spec page for HumanEval and SWE-bench scores where published. For an opinionated pick, consult our Best LLM for Coding ranking.
  • Are either of these models open source?
    Aya Expanse 8B ships open weights (CC-BY-NC 4.0). o3-mini is API-only.
  • When were Aya Expanse 8B and o3-mini released?
    Aya Expanse 8B was released by Cohere on 2024-10-23. o3-mini was released by OpenAI on 2025-01-31.
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