Chinese AI start-up founder hails ‘important improvement’ in OpenAI’s newest model

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a paradigm shift with the launch of OpenAI’s latest 01 model, according to the founder of one of China’s biggest generative AI start-ups, as Chinese firms race to catch up with their US peers.

An “important improvement” made by OpenAI o1, the US start-up’s newest large language model (LLM) released last week, is that it can accomplish tasks that would typically take humans a long time to think about and to complete, Yang Zhilin, founder and chief executive of Chinese unicorn Moonshot AI, said in a sharing session on Saturday in Tianjin, according to a transcript published by Tencent News.

The development represents a paradigm shift because LLM developers, which have run out of organic data to train their models, are now turning to a technique known as reinforcement learning to recreate thought processes and in turn generate more data, Yang said.

San Francisco-based OpenAI, which launched OpenAI o1 on September 12, said in a blog post that its large-scale reinforcement learning algorithm “teaches the model how to think productively using its chain of thought”, and outperforms its other LLMs in reasoning-heavy tasks in fields that include science, coding and maths.

The OpenAI o1 model “spends more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would”, according to OpenAI.