OpenAI is getting closer to releasing a new artificial intelligence model known internally as “Strawberry” that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The timing is still unclear, but a release to a limited number of users could come as soon as this week, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

AI with the ability to reason is considered a major step in the development of the technology - in this case it means that OpenAI’s tools should be able to solve multi-step problems, including complicated math and coding questions. 

The model’s release, which has been rumoured for months, comes as OpenAI is looking to raise billions in funding and faces heightened competition in the race to develop ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI isn’t the only company working on such capabilities; competitors Anthropic and Google have also touted “reasoning” skills with their advanced AI models.

OpenAI declined to comment.

The experience of using OpenAI’s updated AI system will differ somewhat from what people have come to expect with ChatGPT, the company’s chatbot. Before responding to a user’s prompt, the new software will pause for a matter of seconds while, behind the scenes and invisible to the user, it considers a number of related prompts and then summarizes what appears to be the best response, the person said. This technique is sometimes referred to as “chain of thought” prompting. The Information previously reported some details of how Strawberry would process prompts.

This approach could enable the technology to respond more accurately to prompts that currently bedevil ChatGPT and other chatbots. For instance, when asked whether the number 9.11 is larger than 9.9 - a question that may be simple for a human but isn’t always answered correctly even by state-of-the-art AI systems - the updated model was able to correctly determine that 9.9 is bigger, the person said.

During an all-hands meeting in July, OpenAI executives showed off a demonstration of the company’s most advanced AI system enhanced with new reasoning capabilities, Bloomberg previously reported. The product was able to answer several word problems that have stumped its models in the past and also solve an advanced chemistry problem.

OpenAI has been working to get computers to carry out multi-step actions for some time. In May 2023, for instance, the company released a blog post and an accompanying research paper about its efforts to improve AI systems’ abilities to solve math problems. According to the paper, the company trained a model by rewarding it for each correct step in the process toward coming up with an answer to a problem, rather than by just rewarding it for generating an accurate answer.

The topic is also something the company is increasingly addressing publicly. Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, is scheduled to speak about generative AI and multi-step “reasoning agents” at a TED AI event in San Francisco next month, according to the event’s website.

  - Bloomberg