OpenAI is releasing a new artificial intelligence model, known internally as “Strawberry,” that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, as it seeks to stay on top in a crowded market of rivals.
The new model, called o1, is designed to spend more time calculating answers before answering user questions, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. With the model, OpenAI’s tools should be able to solve multi-step problems, including complex math and coding questions.
“As an early model, it still lacks many of the features that make ChatGPT useful, such as browsing the web for information and uploading files and images,” the company said. “But for complex reasoning tasks it is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability. Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1.”
A preview version of the model will be available to paid Plus and Teams users on Thursday through OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Bloomberg previously reported that the company could release the new model as early as this week.
The model’s release comes at a time when San Francisco-based OpenAI is trying to raise billions of dollars in funding and faces stiff competition in the race to develop even more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI is not the only company working on such capabilities; competitors Anthropic and Google have also claimed “reasoning” skills with their advanced AI models.
In its blog post, OpenAI gave examples of the AI model’s responses to questions on topics such as coding, English and math, and asked it to solve a simple crossword puzzle. In a series of posts on X, Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, said the company is currently releasing the model in preview to find out how people use it and where it needs improvement.
The experience of using OpenAI’s updated AI system will be somewhat different from what people expect from the company’s chatbot ChatGPT. Before responding to a user’s prompt, the new software will pause for a few seconds, while behind the scenes and invisible to the user, it considers several related prompts and then summarizes what appears to be the best response. This technique is sometimes referred to as “chain of thought” prompts.
OpenAI has been working on motivating computers to perform multi-step actions for some time now. For example, in May 2023, the company released a blog post and an accompanying research paper about its efforts to improve the abilities of AI systems to solve math problems. According to the paper, the company trained a model by rewarding it for each correct step in the process of answering a problem, rather than simply rewarding it for giving the correct answer.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
