AI: OpenAI's 'Strawberry' Summer. RTZ #443

...pointers to a fruitful AI bounty to come

One thing is this AI Tech Stack remains a constant: OpenAI founder/CEO Sam Altman’s superpower to creatively and cannily communicate the company’s priorities and direction. The Strawberry fields are back again.

In a tweet on X/Twitter yesterday, he cheekily reminded the world of OpenAI’s AI reasoning project ‘Strawberry’:

“i love summer in the garden”

Illustrated with this accompanying picture.

I wrote about their AI Reasoning project ‘Strawberry’ (previously known as Q*) recently. It was a part of a multi-part series on the company’s AGI (Artificial General Intelligence roadmap), recast as a five level AI quest from chatbots of today (L1), to reasoning (L2), to Agents (L3), and then onto Innovators (L4) and Organizations (L5).

But their project Strawberry was what strongly hinted at yesterday. As Venturebeat explains in “Sam Altman stokes rumors of new OpenAI foundation model ‘Strawberry’”:

“Despite an executive shuffle at the top of the company, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman seems unbothered — so much so that he posted on an image to his personal account on the social network X today showing a pleasant view of strawberries growing in planters in a garden, captioned with “i love summer in the garden” in his typical all-lowercase text style.”

“While the photo on its own seems fairly innocuous and even a little bland, it has Altman’s followers on X and others in the large and active AI community on the site giddy with excitement that Altman is actually acknowledging one of the longest-standing rumors about OpenAI’s efforts to develop a new foundation model supposedly codenamed “Strawberry,” which may or may not be equivalent to the expected GPT-5 foundation model.”

The piece goes onto the provide a rundown of the breadcrumbs of this long-awaited AI reasoning technology from OpenAI, that is worth reading:

“Rumors of a massively powerful new OpenAI model kicked off with a report from Reuters in November 2023 describing a new AI model called “Q*” (pronounced “Q-Star,” according to the report):”

“Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.“

“Reuters followed by with an exclusive report in mid-July stating:”

“ChatGPT maker OpenAI 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 reviewed by Reuters.”

“As for what specific new capabilities Strawberry may offer, Reuters reports:”

“The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling 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,” according to the source.”

“In addition, it has been nearly 17 months, or about 1.5 years, since OpenAI released GPT-4, its last major new foundation model class.”

“And while it has released new foundation models GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini in that time — the first trained to be natively multimodal rather than natively text — the competition from Anthropic and Google and Meta with equally or in some cases more powerful models, at least in certain tasks, has only increased markedly as well.”

I’ve written about the importance of OpenAI’s next generation GPT-5 to maintain the company’s leadership in LLM AI technology Scaling, despite the organizational dynamics inside the company. And of course the challenges of its high variable cost business model.

All this of course is part of a broader and more ambitious roadmap of AI products and innovations that I’ve written about, including of course the recently released ‘SearchGPT’, GPT-4 Omni Voice, and other innovations. It all serves to keep the company in the pole position of AI innovation along with Nvidia and others, and their delays, as I’ve discussed.

But for now, OpenAI seems to be maintaining its positive demeanor from the top, cheeky X/Twitter posts and all, despite the long road to its challenging opportunities. Strawberry fields and all. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)