OpenAI lastly unveiled its rumored “Strawberry” AI language mannequin on Thursday, claiming important enhancements in what it calls “reasoning” and problem-solving capabilities over earlier giant language fashions (LLMs). Formally named “OpenAI o1,” the mannequin household will initially launch in two kinds, o1-preview and o1-mini, accessible at the moment for ChatGPT Plus and sure API customers.
OpenAI claims that o1-preview outperforms its predecessor, GPT-4o, on a number of benchmarks, together with aggressive programming, arithmetic, and “scientific reasoning.” Nevertheless, individuals who have used the mannequin say it doesn’t but outclass GPT-4o in each metric. Different customers have criticized the delay in receiving a response from the mannequin, owing to the multi-step processing occurring behind the scenes earlier than answering a question.
In a uncommon show of public hype-busting, OpenAI product supervisor Joanne Jang tweeted, “There’s plenty of o1 hype on my feed, so I am apprehensive that it is perhaps setting the fallacious expectations. what o1 is: the primary reasoning mannequin that shines in actually onerous duties, and it will solely get higher. (I am personally psyched concerning the mannequin’s potential & trajectory!) what o1 is not (but!): a miracle mannequin that does the whole lot higher than earlier fashions. you is perhaps upset if that is your expectation for at the moment’s launch—however we’re working to get there!”
OpenAI stories that o1-preview ranked within the 89th percentile on aggressive programming questions from Codeforces. In arithmetic, it scored 83 % on a qualifying examination for the Worldwide Arithmetic Olympiad, in comparison with GPT-4o’s 13 %. OpenAI additionally states, in a declare that will later be challenged as folks scrutinize the benchmarks and run their very own evaluations over time, o1 performs comparably to PhD students on particular duties in physics, chemistry, and biology. The smaller o1-mini mannequin is designed particularly for coding duties and is priced at 80 % lower than o1-preview.
OpenAI attributes o1’s developments to a brand new reinforcement studying (RL) coaching strategy that teaches the mannequin to spend extra time “pondering by means of” issues earlier than responding, much like how “let’s suppose step-by-step” chain-of-thought prompting can enhance outputs in different LLMs. The brand new course of permits o1 to strive completely different methods and “acknowledge” its personal errors.
AI benchmarks are notoriously unreliable and simple to sport; nevertheless, unbiased verification and experimentation from customers will present the complete extent of o1’s developments over time. It is value noting that MIT Analysis showed earlier this yr that among the benchmark claims OpenAI touted with GPT-4 final yr had been misguided or exaggerated.
A combined bag of capabilities
OpenAI demos “o1” appropriately counting the variety of Rs within the phrase “strawberry.”
Amid many demo videos of o1 finishing programming duties and fixing logic puzzles that OpenAI shared on its web site and social media, one demo stood out as maybe the least consequential and least spectacular, however it might turn into probably the most talked about attributable to a recurring meme the place folks ask LLMs to depend the variety of R’s within the phrase “strawberry.”
Resulting from tokenization, the place the LLM processes phrases in information chunks known as tokens, most LLMs are sometimes blind to character-by-character variations in phrases. Apparently, o1 has the self-reflective capabilities to determine depend the letters and supply an correct reply with out person help.
Past OpenAI’s demos, we have seen optimistic however cautious hands-on stories about o1-preview on-line. Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick wrote on X, “Been utilizing GPT-4o1 for the final month. It’s fascinating—it doesn’t do the whole lot higher but it surely solves some very onerous issues for LLMs. It additionally factors to plenty of future features.”
Mollick shared a hands-on put up in his “One Helpful Factor” weblog that details his experiments with the brand new mannequin. “To be clear, o1-preview doesn’t do the whole lot higher. It’s not a greater author than GPT-4o, for instance. However for duties that require planning, the adjustments are fairly giant.”
Mollick provides the instance of asking o1-preview to construct a educating simulator “utilizing a number of brokers and generative AI, impressed by the paper under and contemplating the views of academics and college students,” then asking it to construct the complete code, and it produced a consequence that Mollick discovered spectacular.
Mollick additionally gave o1-preview eight crossword puzzle clues, translated into textual content, and the mannequin took 108 seconds to resolve it over many steps, getting the entire solutions right however confabulating a selected clue Mollick didn’t give it. We suggest studying Mollick’s entire post for early hands-on impression. Given his expertise with the brand new mannequin, it seems that o1 works similar to GPT-4o however iteratively in a loop, which is one thing that the so-called “agentic” AutoGPT and BabyAGI initiatives experimented with in early 2023.
Is that this what may “threaten humanity?”
Talking of agentic fashions that run in loops, Strawberry has been topic to hype since final November, when it was initially generally known as Q* (Q-star). On the time, The Information and Reuters claimed that, simply earlier than Sam Altman’s transient ouster as CEO, OpenAI staff had internally warned OpenAI’s board of administrators a few new OpenAI mannequin known as Q* that might “threaten humanity.”
In August, the hype continued when The Info reported that OpenAI confirmed Strawberry to US nationwide safety officers.
We have been skeptical concerning the hype round Q* and Strawberry for the reason that rumors first emerged, as this creator noted last November, and Timothy B. Lee lined completely in an excellent post about Q* from final December.
So regardless that o1 is out, AI trade watchers ought to notice how this mannequin’s impending launch was performed up within the press as a harmful development whereas not being publicly downplayed by OpenAI. For an AI mannequin that takes 108 seconds to resolve eight clues in a crossword puzzle and hallucinates one reply, we are able to say that its potential hazard was doubtless hype (for now).
Controversy over “reasoning” terminology
It is no secret that some folks in tech have points with anthropomorphizing AI fashions and utilizing phrases like “thinking” or “reasoning” to explain the synthesizing and processing operations that these neural community programs carry out.
Simply after the OpenAI o1 announcement, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue wrote, “As soon as once more, an AI system just isn’t ‘pondering,’ it is ‘processing,’ ‘operating predictions,’… identical to Google or computer systems do. Giving the misunderstanding that know-how programs are human is simply low-cost snake oil and advertising to idiot you into pondering it is extra intelligent than it’s.”
“Reasoning” can also be a considerably nebulous time period since, even in people, it is difficult to define precisely what the time period means. A couple of hours earlier than the announcement, unbiased AI researcher Simon Willison tweeted in response to a Bloomberg story about Strawberry, “I nonetheless have hassle defining ‘reasoning’ when it comes to LLM capabilities. I’d be fascinated about discovering a immediate which fails on present fashions however succeeds on strawberry that helps reveal the which means of that time period.”
Reasoning or not, o1-preview at present lacks some options current in earlier fashions, akin to internet looking, picture technology, and file importing. OpenAI plans so as to add these capabilities in future updates, together with continued improvement of each the o1 and GPT mannequin collection.
Whereas OpenAI says the o1-preview and o1-mini fashions are rolling out at the moment, neither mannequin is on the market in our ChatGPT Plus interface but, so we now have not been in a position to consider them. We’ll report our impressions on how this mannequin differs from different LLMs we now have beforehand lined.
