Get the latest tech news

The GPT era is already ending

Something has shifted at OpenAI.

This week, OpenAI launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called “the smartest model in the world”—a generative-AI program whose capabilities are supposedly far greater, and more closely approximate how humans think, than those of any such software preceding it. As with primarily prediction-based models, it has an easier time with tasks for which more training examples exist, Tom McCoy, a computational linguist at Yale who has extensively tested the preview version of o1 released in September, told me. Google has recently released several experimental versions of Gemini, its flagship model, all of which exhibit some signs of being maze rats—taking longer to answer questions, providing detailed reasoning chains, improvements on math and coding.

Get the Android app