The hype is unbearable.
Strawberry Fields
ChatGPT maker OpenAI is rumored to be imminently releasing a brand-new AI model, internally dubbed “Strawberry,” that has a “human-like” ability to reason.
As Bloomberg reports, a person familiar with the project says it could be released as soon as this week.
We’ve seen rumors surrounding an OpenAI model capable of reasoning swirl for many months now. In November, Reuters and The Information reported that the company was working on a shadowy project called Q* — pronounced Q-Star — which was alleged to represent a breakthrough in OpenAI’s efforts to realize artificial general intelligence, the theoretical point at which an AI could outperform a human.
In July, Reuters‘ sources revealed that the latest model dubbed Strawberry is a new name for Q*.
But exactly when the company will publicly release the system — nevermind whether it’ll live up to the sky-high hype — remains to be seen. The pressure is on as OpenAI is looking to raise a whopping $6.5 billion from investors, boosting its already sky-high valuation to $150 billion.
A next-generation AI model could address growing concerns that its releases so far don’t represent the technological revolution they promised and that the “AI bubble” is starting to burst.
Cherry Picking
Other AI companies are also said to be working on AI models capable of “reasoning.” Earlier this year, Google’s AI unit DeepMind claimed that its AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry2 could complete high school-level math problems.
AI competitor Anthropic is also looking to upgrade its AI Claude’s ability to reason.
Instead of giving users an answer straight away like with OpenAI’s current ChatGPT chatbot, getting an answer out of Strawberry may take a little longer.
That’s because it uses a new technique called “chain of thought” prompting, which considers a number of different responses before choosing which it deems the best.
OpenAI still has a lot to prove. Could Strawberry really represent a major breakthrough in AI tech? Will it power the next generation of chatbots? What will the experience of using it look like, and how much slower will it be than ChatGPT?
Even more importantly, will it still be as error-prone as its predecessors, which still have the tendency to “hallucinate“?
It’s likely that the Sam Altman-led company will play it safe and slowly roll out its new AI model, so these answers will probably come gradually.
More on OpenAI: Bill Gates, Who Could Afford a Private Army of Researchers, Says He Does His Research Using ChatGPT, Which Makes Mistakes Constantly
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