AI’s next big breakthrough?
OpenAI, the world’s premier artificial intelligence research organization, is on the cusp of releasing its most powerful AI model yet.
Originally known as Project Q* or Q Star, the model has now been codenamed Project Strawberry. Reportedly, the inner workings of the project have been kept under wraps even within OpenAI.
On August 7th, CEO Sam Altman shared a photo on X with a cryptic comment that read, ‘I love summer in the garden’, hinting at the powerful new technology that the company was working on.
i love summer in the garden pic.twitter.com/Ter5Z5nFMc
— Sam Altman (@sama) August 7, 2024
According to a Reuters report last month, the ChatGPT-maker is working on a model capable of advanced reasoning that is a significant step closer to autonomous AI agents. According to internal documents, Strawberry is a model that enables “the company’s AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms ‘deep research.'”
The project has been termed OpenAI’s push to create Artificial General Intelligence — AI with abilities similar to that of the human brain. Reasoning has proven to be one of the trickiest and most difficult problems for AI to solve in the pursuit of human-like intelligence, and if OpenAI succeeds, it will truly be a technological breakthrough.
Two sources of Reuters described how they viewed Q* demos earlier this year, capable of solving tricky science and math questions. It has also solved puzzles like the New York Times Connections, which is a known to be particularly complex.
A recent report in The Information has quoted “two people who have been involved in the effort”, and goes on to say that Project Strawberry could drop this fall, presumably September to November. Its launch will likely exacerbate the intensifying debate about the potentially disruptive effects of AI, both in daily life and labor.
