Summary
OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence.
The new model, called o1, uses a “chain of thought” to process queries, similar to how humans process problems by going through them step-by-step. While GPT-4o only correctly solved only 13 percent of problems, o1 scored 83 percent.
The OpenAI model was named o1 to indicate “resetting the counter back to 1” The company believes it represents a brand-new class of capabilities. OpenAI has designed the interface to show the reasoning steps as the model thinks.
The company is bringing reasoning capabilities to LLMs because it sees a future with autonomous systems, or agents. The thinking is that, if a model is capable of more than pattern recognition, it could unlock breakthroughs in areas like medicine and engineering.
O1’s reasoning abilities are relatively slow, not agent-like, and expensive for developers to use. “We have been spending many months working on reasoning because we think this is actually the critical breakthrough,” says McGrew.
