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As competitors start to catch up to OpenAI’s GPT-4o, people have been watching the AI research giant to see what is next. This week, the founder, Sam Altman, may have just teased the new model ‘Strawberry.’
Altman took to X on Wednesday (August 7) to share an image of strawberries growing in planters outside. He even captioned it with “i love summer in the garden.”
i love summer in the garden pic.twitter.com/Ter5Z5nFMc
— Sam Altman (@sama) August 7, 2024
While this doesn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary, his followers and the wider AI community believe it could be the confirmation they’ve been looking for about a long-running rumor.
There has been discussion around OpenAI’s future plans for some time now, with the main rumor being that they’re developing a foundation model called ‘Strawberry’ which could be the GPT-5 variant everyone’s been waiting for.
This is a reference to Project Strawberry (the new Q*)—the reasoning project OAI has been rumored to work on for over a year now.
The problem, however, is that several other labs, including Google, have cracked a bunch of techniques around math, reasoning, and synthetic data.… https://t.co/38jZHG3lYf
— Bindu Reddy (@bindureddy) August 7, 2024
Bindu Reddy, the CEO of an AI startup, explained the reference. She said: “This is a reference to Project Strawberry (the new Q*)—the reasoning project OAI has been rumored to work on for over a year now…”
OpenAI’s Project Strawberry has been in the works for some time
It was on July 12 when Reuters reported that the ChatGPT maker is “working on a novel approach to its artificial intelligence models in a project code-named ‘Strawberry,’ according to a person familiar with the matter” and internal documentation that the publisher said they had reviewed.
Their source said, “how Strawberry works is a tightly kept secret even within OpenAI.”
The document seen by the publisher is said to have described the project as having the aim of being able “to not just generate answers to queries but to plan enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably.”
When Reuters asked OpenAI about the rumor, a spokesperson said: “We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do. 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.”
At the time, they didn’t directly answer questions related to the supposed project. But, Altman’s latest social media post has provided many with the unofficial confirmation they were looking for.
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
