OpenAI launches new o1 language model with ‘reasoning’ abilities, Sam Altman says it is ‘still flawed’

OpenAI has released a new series of models codenamed o1 with ‘reasoning’ capabilities that are designed to spend more time before responding to users' queries. The new model is immediately available for use and is said to have the ability to perform more complex tasks that were thought possible by previous models. 

While o1 is said to be better at performing some tasks like coding and solving multistep problems but it is also slower and costlier than current models like GPT-4o. 

OpenAI researcher Noam Brown in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) stated that o1 is designed to ‘think’ in a private chain of thought before responding to queries. Brown states that the longer o1 the better it does on reasoning tasks. 

Explaining o1's thinking process in a blogpost, OpenAI wrote, “Similar to how a human may think for a long time before responding to a difficult question, o1 uses a chain of thought when attempting to solve a problem. Through reinforcement learning, o1 learns to hone its chain of thought and refine the strategies it uses. It learns to recognize and correct its mistakes. It learns to break down tricky steps into simpler ones. It learns to try a different approach when the current one isn’t working.”

OpenAI has confirmed that o1 preview and o1 mini be available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users from today while Enterprise and Edu users will get access to the new model next week. Moreover, the Microsoft backed company said that it plans to bring o1-mini to free ChatGPT users.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also informed about the new AI model via a X post, he wrote, “here is o1, a series of our most capable and aligned models yet: 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.but also, it is the beginning of a new paradigm: AI that can do general-purpose complex reasoning.”