Greetings from The Pridwin, where it’s Day 3 of the Brand Innovators Executive Retreat on Shelter Island. I had a funny moment yesterday because, during my speech, I told the audience that I expected OpenAI to release some version of its new model in the next few days… maybe even today. Then, right after I got off stage…
OpenAI released a new AI model called o1, which the company says is the first in a "new series of reasoning models for solving hard problems." Is this the rumored project Strawberry? It has many of Strawberry’s rumored features. Let's dig in.
I've been using o1 for a few hours, and it does this quirky thing when you enter a prompt: it tells you it's "thinking," then walks you through the steps it's taking to solve the problem. The model is very slow (compared to GPT-4o), so it needs to do something to pass the time, but "thinking"? It's not thinking – at least not the way humans do.
This descriptive overreach may come back to haunt OpenAI. When legislators are given a label for something, it usually sticks. I'm not sure the AI industry needs a bunch of laypeople and lawmakers spreading FUD that now there are AI models that think like humans. First, it's not true. Second, it's going to become a marketing nightmare. Moving on.
OpenAI admits that they suck at naming their products, so "OpenAI o1-preview" (which I assume will ultimately just be named "OpenAI o1") should not be confused with GPT-4o. The models are different, and (at the moment) they do different things.
This new release includes o1-preview and a smaller, more affordable version called o1-mini. OpenAI designed o1 to improve on tasks such as writing code and solving multistep problems, surpassing GPT-4o in specific benchmarks like math and coding, although it is slower and more expensive to use. ChatGPT Plus and Team users already have access to o1-preview, with Enterprise and Edu users gaining access next week. The price for using o1-preview via the API is significantly higher than GPT-4o: $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens.
According to OpenAI, o1 was trained using reinforcement learning – a technique that rewards correct behavior and penalizes incorrect responses – and it processes queries step-by-step, "similar to human reasoning." OpenAI claims the model hallucinates less than previous versions, but it still hallucinates a bit. Notably, o1 scored 83% on an International Mathematics Olympiad exam; GPT-4o scored 13%.
The company notes: "This is an early preview of these reasoning models in ChatGPT and the API. In addition to model updates, we expect to add browsing, file and image uploading, and other features to make them more useful to everyone. We also plan to continue developing and releasing models in our GPT series, in addition to the new OpenAI o1 series."
I'm only a few hours into using o1. So far, it seems like o1 has less knowledge than GPT-4o, but is better at problem solving; this is what OpenAI says about it, too.
At dinner last night, one of the guests asked a kind of icebreaker question: "Name the four American colleges or universities that are a color." Everyone at the table got Brown, Auburn, and Sienna immediately, but the fourth was elusive. Finally, I was asked to use ChatGPT to solve the problem. Both 4o and o1-preview were available on my phone, so I started with o1. It got Brown, but then stopped. 4o instantly offered Brown, Auburn, Evergreen State College, Vermillion Community College, and a dozen others. The answer the interlocutor was seeking was "Navy," which is a nickname for the United States Naval Academy. Neither human nor AI got that answer; I'd humbly submit nicknames don't count. However, it was a fun way to armchair research 4o and o1 with great friends, great food, and flowing adult frosty beverages.
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ABOUT SHELLY PALMER
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
