September

2 events

Editors' summary

OpenAI ships a model that thinks, and loses its leadership

On 12 September, OpenAI released o1-preview. Designed to spend longer thinking before answering, it far outscored earlier models on hard maths and science problems, and was read as a way to improve models other than making them bigger. The step-by-step reasoning that people had been eliciting by hand since 2022 was now trained in with reinforcement learning; users no longer had to ask for it. Its refusal to show the reasoning itself, returning only a summary, was also debated.

On the 25th, CTO Mira Murati said she was leaving. Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and research VP Barret Zoph went at the same time. The departures that had run since May had reached the executive team.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record2 events

12
ModelOpenAI
OpenAI releases o1-preview, its first reasoning model
OpenAI released o1-preview and o1-mini, preview versions of OpenAI o1, a reasoning model that spends time "thinking" before answering. Trained with reinforcement learning to refine its chain of thought and using more compute at inference time, it substantially outperformed GPT-4o on hard math, coding, and science problems. What was new at the time was the demonstration that performance could be bought with inference-time compute, not only with training scale.
25
PeopleOpenAI / Mira Murati / Bob McGrew / Barret Zoph
CTO Mira Murati and top research leaders leave OpenAI
Mira Murati, OpenAI's CTO of six and a half years who briefly served as interim CEO during the November 2023 crisis, announced her departure, writing on X that she wanted to "create the time and space to do my own exploration." The same day, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research Barret Zoph also announced they were leaving, a wave of executive exits that drew scrutiny as the company negotiated a major funding round and a for-profit restructuring.

↑ 2024

OpenAI releases o1-preview, its first reasoning model

CTO Mira Murati and top research leaders leave OpenAI