OpenAI releases reasoning AI with eye on safety, accuracy

San Francisco: ChatGPT creator OpenAI on Thursday released a new series of artificial intelligence models designed to spend more time thinking - in hopes that generative AI chatbots provide more accurate and beneficial responses.

The new models, known as OpenAI o1-Preview, are designed to tackle complex tasks and solve more challenging problems in science, coding and mathematics, something that earlier models have been criticized for failing to provide consistently.

Unlike their predecessors, these models have been trained to refine their thinking processes, try different methods and recognize mistakes, before they deploy a final answer.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hailed the models as "a new paradigm: AI that can do general-purpose complex reasoning."

However, he cautioned that the technology "is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it."

Microsoft-backed OpenAI said that in tests, the models performed comparably to PhD students on difficult tasks in physics, chemistry and biology.

They also excelled in mathematics and coding, achieving an 83 percent success rate on a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, compared to 13 percent for GPT-4o, its most advanced general use model.

The company said the enhanced reasoning capabilities could be used for healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, physicists to generate complex formulas or computer developers to build and execute multi-step designs.

The company also said that the models survived rigorous jailbreaking tests and could better withstand attempts to circumvent its guardrails.

OpenAI said its strengthened safety measures also included recent agreements with the US and UK AI Safety Institutes that were granted early access to the models for evaluation and testing.