For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.
The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”
OpenAI taught previous GPT models to mimic patterns from its training data. With o1, it trained the model to solve problems on its own using a technique known as reinforcement learning, which teaches the system through rewards and penalties. It then uses a “chain of thought” to process queries, similarly to how humans process problems by going through them step-by-step.
At the same time, o1 is not as capable as GPT-4o in a lot of areas. It doesn’t do as well on factual knowledge about the world. It also doesn’t have the ability to browse the web or process files and images. Still, the company believes it represents a brand-new class of capabilities. It was named o1 to indicate “resetting the counter back to 1.”
I think this is the most important part (emphasis mine):
As a result of this new training methodology, OpenAI says the model should be more accurate. “We have noticed that this model hallucinates less,” Tworek says. But the problem still persists. “We can’t say we solved hallucinations.”
I’d recommend everyone saying “it can’t understand anything and can’t think” to look at this example:
https://x.com/flowersslop/status/1834349905692824017
Try to solve it after seeing only the first image before you open the second and see o1’s response.
Let me know if you got it before seeing the actual answer.
This example doesn’t prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn’t demonstrate “reasoning” in any meaningful way.
I think if you can actually define reasoning, your comments (and those like yours) would be much more convincing. I’m just calling yours out because I’ve seen you up and down in this thread repeating it, but it’s a general observed of the vocal critics of the technology overall. Neither intelligence nor reasons (likewise understanding and knowing, for that matter) are easily defined in a way that is more useful than invoking spirits and ghosts. In this case, detecting patterns certainly seems a critical component of what we would consider to be reasoning. I don’t think it’s sufficient, buy it is absolutely necessary.
You should really look at the full CoT traces on the demos.
I think you think you know more than you actually know.
Got a link to that?
Yep:
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/
First interactive section. Make sure to click “show chain of thought.”
The cipher one is particularly interesting, as it’s intentionally difficult for the model.
The tokenizer is famously bad at two letter counts, which is why previous models can’t count the number of rs in strawberry.
So the cipher depends on two letter pairs, and you can see how it screws up the tokenization around the xx at the end of the last word, and gradually corrects course.
Will help clarify how it’s going about solving something like the example I posted earlier behind the scenes.