OpenAI Debuts o1 Reasoning Model With Mixed Early Results
OpenAI releases its highly anticipated o1 model that "thinks" before answering, offering improved reasoning for complex problems at a much higher cost. However, it currently lacks the speed and multimodal features of GPT-4o.
OpenAI releases its new o1 models, giving users an AI that pauses to "think" before generating an answer. Formerly known internally as "Strawberry," this model breaks down complex problems into small steps and uses multi-step reasoning to identify correct and incorrect logic. While this approach generates excitement in the AI community for tackling big ideas, early testers find the overall improvement to be inconsistent rather than a universal upgrade.
Compared to the popular GPT-4o, the o1 model feels like one step forward and two steps back. It struggles with simpler tasks and completely lacks the tools, multimodal capabilities, and speed that make GPT-4o so impressive. OpenAI even admits on its help page that GPT-4o remains the best option for most prompts, suggesting that o1 serves a very specific niche rather than acting as a universal replacement.
The specialized reasoning comes with a steep financial cost, making o1 roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o. This high price tag stems from a hidden computing process where the model works through intermediate steps before delivering a final answer. Because of these limitations and costs, experts recommend saving o1 exclusively for the large, complex questions it is specifically designed to solve.