OpenAI's recent executive changes do not seem to have dampened the spirits of its co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman. Today, he shared a photo on social network X of strawberries growing in a pot, accompanied by the caption "I love summer in the garden," sparking widespread speculation and discussion within the AI community.
Although the photo appears ordinary, members of the AI community speculate that it might be Altman hinting at a new foundational model under development at OpenAI, codenamed "Strawberry." This model is believed to be on par with the highly anticipated GPT-5. A blogger on X, @kimmonismus, posted: "What more clues do we need? This could be confirmation of Q*."
Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI, an open-source AI startup, also believes this is a "reference" to the "Strawberry Project." She suggests it's an indication of a reasoning project OAI has reportedly been researching for over a year.
Additionally, a new AI model called "Anonymous Chatbot" has been added to the popular open-source lmsys arena, increasing curiosity about the "Strawberry" project. Early users report that this new model shows advanced reasoning capabilities compared to GPT-4o and other competitors, suggesting it might be more powerful.
Regarding the "Strawberry" project, Reuters mentioned a new AI model named "Q*" in a November 2023 report, considered a breakthrough in OpenAI's pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In May 2024, Reuters released an exclusive report stating that OpenAI was working on a project codenamed "Strawberry," employing novel methods for its AI models.
The goal of the "Strawberry" project is to enable OpenAI's AI to not only generate answers to queries but also plan ahead, browse the internet autonomously and reliably, and perform so-called "deep research."
Since the release of OpenAI's last major new foundational model, GPT-4, nearly 17 months have passed. During this time, despite the release of new models like GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, OpenAI needs to keep innovating to maintain its leading position in the AI field amid competition from Anthropic, Google, and Meta.