OpenAI’s “Revolutionary” o1 Model Has A Fatal Flaw
I was right; it’s all just smoke and mirrors.
One of the biggest faults of LLM (Large Language Model) AIs is their hallucinations. These AIs simply can’t stop spouting demonstrably false claims. For example, Elon Musk’s own Grok AI has accused him of going to court for paedophilia, and ChatGPT has even said Musk has been dead for the last few years. So it was huge news when OpenAI announced that its latest model, o1, manages to solve this problem by fact-checking itself and spending more time considering all parts of a question. If true, this would be a monumental leap forward for the AI industry. So, how does it do this? Well, spoiler alert: it can’t.
I’ve already gone over o1, also known as “Strawberry,” and how it works (click here to read more). But the basic gist is that the model automates a fairly successful prompting technique known as chain-of-thought. This is where you ask the AI to explain each step of its logic. Now, this is anthropomorphising the machine a bit here, as it isn’t actually explaining to you what it is doing. Instead, it breaks up the question into steps and solves each step in a chain, hence the name. This gives the AI the ability to correct its hallucinations, as if a previous step contains a false fact or piece of logic, the AI gets a second chance to correct it in the next…
