OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train its o-series of models.
On Friday, OpenAI released new research on “deliberative alignment,” outlining the company’s latest way to ensure AI reasoning models stay aligned with the values of their human developers. The startup used this method to make o1 and o3 “think” about OpenAI’s safety policy during inference, the phase after a user presses enter on their prompt.
This method improved o1’s overall alignment to the company’s safety principles, according to OpenAI’s research. This means deliberative alignment decreased the rate at which o1 answered “unsafe” questions – at least ones deemed unsafe by OpenAI – while improving its ability to answer benign ones.
As AI models rise in popularity, and power, AI safety research seems increasingly relevant. But at the same time, it’s more controversial: David Sacks, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen say some AI safety measures are actually “censorship,” highlighting the subjective nature in these decisions.