OpenAI released a new model that “thinks” to itself before it answers. They intentionally designed the interface to hide this inner monologue. There was absolutely no technical reason to do so. Only business reasons

If you try to make o1 reveal its inner monologue, they threaten to remove your access

Because if they let people freely extract this, competitors could quickly use that to improve their models

It seems that AI value creation will be shifting more towards inference-time compute, into Chains of Thought. We might be witnessing the birth of a new paradigm of open vs. closed thought

Impressive as o1 is, the move to hide CoTs is pretty pathetic and reminds of Microsoft’s late 90s Windows Server push. Below is an email from Bill Gates about how he is worried that Microsoft won’t be able to corner the server market. A few years after he wrote those lines, Linux and LAMP came to dominate servers

Now all eyes on AI at Meta and Zuck for their take on o1/Strawberry/Q*/Orion

Originally posted on LinkedIn