OpenAI just unleashed an alien of extraordinary ability
I’m a journalist with a master’s degree in computer science. Subscribe now to get future articles delivered straight to your inbox.
You might remember around Thanksgiving last year when news broke about Q*, an OpenAI project to build models that can solve difficult math problems. The Reuters report on Q* claimed that some OpenAI researchers had written a letter to the OpenAI board “warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.”
The Q* project was renamed Strawberry earlier this year. Then last week, OpenAI finally revealed what the Strawberry team had been working on:
OpenAI says the “o” just stands for OpenAI, though some people joked that it’s a reference to the O-1 visa, which the US government grants to “aliens of extraordinary ability.”
Over the last nine months I’ve written a number of articles about new frontier models: Gemini 1.0 Ultra, Claude 3, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini Pro 1.5, and Grok 2 and Llama 3.1. I was more impressed by some of these models and less impressed by others. But none of them were more than incremental improvements over the original GPT-4.
