After weeks of speculation about a new and more powerful AI product in the works, OpenAI today announced its first “reasoning model.” The program, known as o1, may in many respects be OpenAI’s most powerful AI offering yet, with problem-solving capacities that resemble those of a human mind more than any software before. Or, at least, that’s how the company is selling it.
As with most OpenAI research and product announcements, o1 is, for now, somewhat of a tease. The start-up claims that the model is far better at complex tasks but released very few details about the model’s training. And o1 is currently available only as a limited preview to paid ChatGPT users and select programmers. All that the general public has to go off of is a grand pronouncement: OpenAI believes it has figured out how to build software so powerful that it will soon think “similarly to PhD students” in physics, chemistry, and biology tasks. The…