Locator: 48770OPENAI.
Updates
August 3, 2025: META: to share costs of building out AI.
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Seminal Article
The TechCrunch article featured here may be a seminal article on the future of AI. I don't know but for now I may use this post as the site where I track general articles on the future of AI. AI is tracked here on the blog.
First thought: things are moving so fast in AI, it's important that Apple take a pause, and really think this out. It's very clear that developing AI in-house was a completely naive thought by Apple.
According to leaked information, o1 was formerly known within OpenAI as "Q*", and later as "Strawberry."
The codename "Q*" first surfaced in November 2023, around the time of Sam Altman's ousting and subsequent reinstatement, with rumors suggesting that this experimental model had shown promising results on mathematical benchmarks.
In July 2024, Reuters reported that OpenAI was developing a generative pre-trained transformer known as "Strawberry", which later became o1.
For now, and this may change, but for now I divide chatbots into two categories:
- conversational chat; and,
- specialty chat.
Examples:
- conversational chat: ChatGPT (OpenAI)
- specialty chat: Claude (Anthropic)
Full article here from TechCrunch, for personal use only.
Shortly after Hunter Lightman joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2022, he watched his colleagues launch ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing products ever.
Meanwhile, Lightman quietly worked on a team teaching OpenAI’s models to solve high school math competitions. Today that team, known as MathGen, is considered instrumental to OpenAI’s industry-leading effort to create AI reasoning models: the core technology behind AI agents that can do tasks on a computer like a human would.
“We were trying to make the models better at mathematical reasoning, which at the time they weren’t very good at,” Lightman told TechCrunch, describing MathGen’s early work. OpenAI’s models are far from perfect today — the company’s latest AI systems still hallucinate and its agents struggle with complex tasks.
But its state-of-the-art models have improved significantly on mathematical reasoning. One of OpenAI’s models recently won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad, a math competition for the world’s brightest high school students. OpenAI believes these reasoning capabilities will translate to other subjects, and ultimately power general-purpose agents that the company has always dreamed of building.ChatGPT was a happy accident — a lowkey research preview turned viral consumer business — but OpenAI’s agents are the product of a years-long, deliberate effort within the company.
“Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the company’s first developer conference in 2023. “These capabilities are often talked about in the AI field as agents. The upsides of this are going to be tremendous.”
Whether agents will meet Altman’s vision remains to be seen, but OpenAI shocked the world with the release of its first AI reasoning model, o1, in the fall of 2024. Less than a year later, the 21 foundational researchers behind that breakthrough are the most highly sought-after talent in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg recruited five of the o1 researchers to work on Meta’s new superintelligence-focused unit, offering some compensation packages north of $100 million. One of them, Shengjia Zhao, was recently named chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. The reinforcement learning renaissance The rise of OpenAI’s reasoning models and agents are tied to a machine learning training technique known as reinforcement learning (RL). RL provides feedback to an AI model on whether its choices were correct or not in simulated environments.
