Solving hard problems in new ways
I have had access to the much-rumored OpenAI “Strawberry” enhanced reasoning system for awhile, and now that it is public, I can finally share some thoughts1. It is amazing, still limited, and, perhaps most importantly, a signal of where things are heading.
The new AI model, called o1-preview (why are the AI companies so bad at names?), lets the AI “think through” a problem before solving it. This lets it address very hard problems that require planning and iteration, like novel math or science questions. In fact, it can now beat human PhD experts in solving extremely hard physics problems.