Yep, it defaults to doing a web search even when that doesn't make sense.

Example, I asked it to write something. And then I asked it to give me that blob of text in markdown format. So everything it needed was already in the conversation. That took a whole minute of doing web searches and what not.

I actually dislike using o3 for this reason. I keep the default to 4o. But sometimes I forget to switch back and it goes off boiling the oceans to answer a simple question. It's a bit too trigger happy with that. In general all this version and model soup is impossible to figure out for non technical users. And I noticed 4o is now sometimes starting to do the same. I guess, too many users never use the model drop down.

After the last few weeks, where o3 seems desperate to do tool searches or re-crunch a bad gen even though I only asked a question about it, I assumed that the policy is to burn through credits at the fastest possible rate. With this price change, I don't know what's happening now...