When rivals take a different approach and succeed, it sometimes pays to change course. This is what Sam Altman said OpenAI will do, according to a Reddit AMA session on Friday.
The discussion touched on several AI topics, but in particular Altman was asked about DeepSeek, which has taken the tech world by storm after rolling out top-performing AI models that are relatively cheap to use. One Reddit user asked if OpenAI could show "all of the thinking tokens." This refers to the chain of thought that new "reasoning" AI models use to break tasks into smaller steps — similar to how humans think through complex challenges.
OpenAI's o1 and o3 models use this reasoning approach, however they don't show any of the intermediate thinking steps to users, and instead just show the final answer. DeepSeek's reasoning models, such as its R1 offering, show every step to users. When Business Insider demoed DeepSeek with the Chinese lab's DeepThink setting, it shared about 16 pages of mathematical steps before providing the correct answer to a tough question.
On Friday, Altman said OpenAI would follow DeepSeek's approach. "Yeah we are gonna show a much more helpful and detailed version of this, soon. Credit to R1 for updating us," he wrote. Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has said the biggest takeaway from DeepSeek's success is the value of open-source AI models versus proprietary ones.
Meta's Llama models are mostly open-source, letting anyone access important details such as weights and parameters for free. Sharing the inner-workings of models like this allows other developers and many companies to customize these models for their own use. Despite its name, OpenAI has taken a more closed approach to AI development so far. Most of its models are proprietary and the startup charges for access.
More on OpenAI’s Open Source posture on Business Insider
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