OpenAI is said to be working on a potentially groundbreaking new approach for its artificial intelligence models that could produce advanced reasoning capabilities that have, so far, been out of the grasp of even the most cutting-edge AI technology.
Reasoning is widely considered to be one of the keys to building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that can learn, adapt and solve problems the way the human brain does.
The project is code-named Strawberry, according to internal documents leaked to Reuters.
In an interview with the news agency, a person familiar with the matter said the Sam Altman-led company is racing toward advanced AI capabilities, beyond what the general public may even think possible.
“We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. “Continuous research into new AI capabilities is a common practice in the industry, with a shared belief that these systems will improve in reasoning over time.”
Newsweek reached out to OpenAI for more information but did not hear back immediately.
The source told Reuters that Strawberry is a “work in progress.” A release date is not currently known, and the project is said to be a tightly kept secret even within the halls of OpenAI.
The documents describing the project and the source who spoke to Reuters suggests Strawberry is building AI models that will go beyond generating answers to queries, with the ability to do advanced human-like reasoning and “deep research” autonomously, without human prompts.
Project Strawberry was originally called Q*, demos of which have reportedly been capable of solving advanced mathematical and scientific problems.
Another source who spoke to Reuters said an OpenAI model scored over 90% on a MATH dataset, a benchmark for championship math problems.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported last week that OpenAI showed off a demo of a research project at an internal all-hands meeting that claimed the AI had new “human-like reasoning skills.”
It is unclear if either of those models were what is now called Strawberry.
AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File
What Has Sam Altman Said?
Altman has not said anything publicly about Strawberry, but did recently hint at the company’s plans for future iterations of ChatGPT, the commercially available AI bot that remains OpenAI’s flagship project. He compared the rise of AI to industrial-era developments and attempted to reassure an anxious public that the developers of cutting-edge AI applications are taking into account their worries that the technology could become too powerful.
Speaking alongside Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky at the 20th Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, Altman said the development of increasingly advanced AI, like the work beind done under the Strawberry codename, is “inevitable.”
“We think about it as this series of thresholds where the systems get better and better capabilities,” Altman said. “You can use ChatGPT today for some things and you’ll be able to use it for much more helpful tasks in the future.”
Jason Redmond/Getty images
At the same time, Altman is behind the new AI Ethics Council, co-founded along with Operation HOPE CEO John Hope Bryant, as a sort of non-binding AI governance model also intended ensure that traditionally underrepresented communities have a voice in the technological revolution.
“There are bad people in the world who will use artificial intelligence to do bad things,” Bryant told Newsweek in an interview. “We need to get to scale before they do.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Source: What we know about OpenAI’s secretive ‘Project Strawberry’
