OpenAI's Project "Strawberry" Seeks to Revolutionize AI Reasoning Capabilities

In a groundbreaking initiative that could redefine artificial intelligence as we know it, OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and backed by Microsoft, is clandestinely crafting a new AI technology famously known as "Strawberry". This project appears to be a gargantuan leap in the AI industry, focusing on enhancing reasoning abilities—a frontier yet to be conquered by current AI models.

The details of Strawberry, stemming from internal documents and a source in the know, suggest an ambition for AIs to independently perform intricate web-based research, and engage in planning akin to a human researcher, which has historically been a challenge for AI technologies.

"Strawberry" is reportedly the evolution of a previously discussed breakthrough dubbed "Q*", which has been subject to internal demonstrations earlier this year, highlighting its capacity to solve complex problems in science and mathematics—a domain traditionally difficult for AI models.

While AI currently possesses the skill to process large volumes of text and craft compositions with efficiency surpassing human capability, it struggles with simple intuitive tasks. Strawberry is geared towards refining the common-sense reasoning and planning aspects, which could lead to significant advances in scientific discoveries to software development.

Improving reasoning in AI is not an isolated endeavor; tech giants such as Google, Meta, and academic laboratories are also exploring various methodologies. Nevertheless, opinions diverge on whether large language models can indeed replicate human-like reasoning and long-term planning.

One thing that stands out in the AI community is the concept of "post-training" to enrich AI models with specialized skills—the backbone of Strawberry's development strategy. Methods like "fine-tuning", which involves human feedback and conditioning with exemplary responses, are part of this phase.

The philosophy behind Strawberry shares a semblance with a Stanford 2022 invention named "Self-Taught Reasoner" or "STaR", which presents a self-improving AI model through iterative creation of its training data, potentially surpassing human intelligence levels, as conveyed by its Stanford professor creator, Noah Goodman, who is not connected to OpenAI's Strawberry.

With the focus on what OpenAI terms as long-horizon tasks (LHT), Strawberry is intended to endow AI with the capability to map out extended operations, employing a dataset tailored for deep-research purposes. The ultimate goal for OpenAI is to foster models that can autonomously browse the web and execute tasks that currently fall under the domain of software and machine learning engineers.