OpenAI o1: Incremental Progress, Not Revolution

o1 shows some improvements over GPT-4o. It fixed a small bug in my code, returning a working solution that was on par with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and better than GPT-4o.

The reasoning summaries it provides are useful for certain tasks, offering insight into its decision-making process.

But o1 isn't the leap forward that OpenAI's marketing might suggest. At its core, it's using enhanced reasoning to call itself multiple times and produce a "best attempt" output. This approach works, but it's not revolutionary.

I estimate about 80% of o1's functionality could be replicated using the existing API. You'd need to implement multiple calls, instruct the model to reason step-by-step, and synthesize a final result. o1 essentially wraps this process into a single call.

This release raises questions about OpenAI's progress. They're promising GPT-5 and AGI, but delivering incremental improvements.

o1 is worth exploring, but don't expect it to fundamentally change your workflow. Most of its gains can be achieved with clever use of GPT-4o.

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