Altman hints at groundbreaking AI, reveals Project Strawberry

OpenAI is developing Project Strawberry to improve its AI models’ ability to handle long-horizon tasks, which involve planning and executing complex actions over extended periods. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, hinted at this project in a cryptic social media post, sharing an image of strawberries with the caption, ‘I love summer in the garden.’ That led to speculation about the project’s potential impact on AI capabilities.

Project Strawberry, also known as Q*, aims to significantly enhance the reasoning abilities of OpenAI’s AI models. According to a recent Reuters report, some at OpenAI believe Q* could be a breakthrough in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The project involves innovative approaches that allow AI models to plan ahead and navigate the internet autonomously, addressing common sense issues and logical fallacies that often result in inaccurate outputs.

OpenAI has announced DevDay 2024, a global developer event series with stops in San Francisco, London, and Singapore. The focus will be on advancements in the API and developer tools, though there is speculation that OpenAI might preview its next frontier model. Recent developments in the LMsys chatbot arena, where a new model showed strong performance in math, suggest significant progress in AI capabilities.

Internal documents reveal that Project Strawberry includes a “deep-research” dataset for training and evaluating the models, although the contents remain undisclosed. The innovation is expected to enable AI to conduct research autonomously, using a computer-using agent to act based on its findings. OpenAI plans to test Strawberry’s capabilities in performing tasks typically done by software and machine learning engineers, highlighting its potential to revolutionise AI applications.