ChatGPT maker OpenAI unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model Thursday that it says can “reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems” than its earlier models.
The latest model, the first in a new series called OpenAI o1, can perform similarly to Ph.D. students on “challenging” benchmark tests in physics, chemistry and biology, the company said in a blog post.
“We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would,” OpenAI wrote. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.”
The company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, touted the models as “the start of a new era in AI.”
“We’re no longer limited by pretraining paradigm; now, we can scale through inference compute, opening up new possibilities for capabilities and alignment,” Murati said in a post on social platform X.
While the model released Thursday, known as o1-preview, has greater capability for complex reasoning, OpenAI noted that the last model it released, GPT-4o, may still be more effective for common uses.
The o1-preview does not have certain features that made earlier models useful, such as web browsing and file and image uploads, the company said.
“o1 is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X.
However, Altman added in a separate post that he is “extremely proud of the team; this was a monumental effort across the entire company.”
OpenAI also unveiled o1-mini, “a faster, cheaper reasoning model that is particularly effective at coding” and is 80 percent cheaper than o1-preview.
Both o1-preview and o1-mini became available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users Thursday, while ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users will get access to the new models next week.