‘But when o1 comes out, it will feel like a major leap forward.’
OpenAI’s o1-preview is generating excitement in the tech world. However, it is still not the epitome of perfection. In a recent interview, OpenAI chief Sam Altman said “o1-preview is deeply flawed, but when o1 comes out, it will feel like a major leap forward.” Altman looked back at the company’s early years, revealing that it took nearly 4.5 years before OpenAI launched its first product.
“Our first product, GPT-3, was not something we were particularly proud of at the time,” he admitted. Despite the buzz surrounding GPT-3, the team identified its limitations. After several more iterations, it led to the release of GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and ultimately GPT-4, before they began to realize the full potential of their work.
Essentially, the company’s vision goes beyond incremental improvements.
“We often focus too much on ‘less bad,’ on fixing immediate issues, rather than dreaming of the breakthroughs that could propel humanity to the next level,” he said.
Rather than settling for temporary or immediate fixes, Open AI’s mission is to strive for long term progress for humanity rather than instant gratification.
This long-term focus on innovation aligns with OpenAI’s broader goal of transforming how AI is integrated into society. The CEO acknowledged that delivering groundbreaking products took time, but now OpenAI is better positioned to shape the future. “We’ve started to deliver great products, but we’re going to deliver far greater ones,” he promised.
In another interview, Altman described the company’s latest AI model, o1, as being at the ‘GPT-2 stage’ of reasoning development. Altman explained, “I think of this as like we’re at the GPT-2 stage of these new kinds of reasoning models.” He emphasised that while the model is still early in its development, significant improvements are expected in the coming months.
Altman said that users will notice o1 rapidly improving as OpenAI moves from the o1-preview model to the full release. “Even in the coming months, you’ll see it get a lot better as we move from o1-preview to o1, which we shared some metrics for in our launch blog post,” he said.
Altman further mentioned that he loves the startup energy as they are redefining success in the industry. Given their dynamism, startups can iterate faster and adapt more quickly than large corporations. Instead of asking for advice on what to build, founders of startups should trust their instincts and and bold ideas.
In this regard, Altman also stated how countries like Italy should focus on using their past as a springboard for future innovation in AI.
