Project Strawberry Explained: Is ChatGPT Getting a Huge Upgrade?

Last month, Reutersreportedthat ChatGPT creator OpenAI is working on a projectcodenamed “Strawberry”. Internal documents reviewed by the publication show that Project Strawberry is about enabling AI to perform “deep research” autonomously on the web. When asked about the project, OpenAI’s spokesperson said, “these systems will improve in reasoning over time.” Now, what exactly is Project Strawberry and what exactly is OpenAI cooking? Is it the upcoming GPT-5 model, aka ChatGPT 5? Let’s discuss it.

OpenAI’s Project Strawberry Explained

Project Strawberry is said to berelated to Q*— the next breakthrough in AI development believed by OpenAI staffers inside the company. There is not much information about Q* in the public domain. However, sources who viewed the demo say that it’s capable of solving science and math-related questions that no other current models can demonstrate.

It has scored over 90% on a MATH dataset, a rigorous benchmark for testing proficiency in math problems.Bloombergrecently reported that OpenAI held an internal demo, where it demonstrated a research project that showcased human-like reasoning. OpenAI also presented different levels of AI progress, which we have described in ourAGI explainer, and are as follows:

Many believe that with Project Strawberry, OpenAIhas reached Level 2where AI systems can reason intelligently like humans. Reuters’ report suggests that Project Strawberry includes a post-training method where the model is trained in a specific way, similar to fine-tuning.

This specific technique for post-training is very similar to Self-Taught Reasoner or STaR (arXiv), a chain-of-thought method, proposed by Stanford researchers in 2022. It aims to improve the model performance “on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics or commonsense question-answering” by “generating step-by-step “chain-of-thought” rationales.”

In simple terms, STaR basically allows the model toimprove itself by learning from its own generated reasoning. It seems that OpenAI is likely using the STaR technique for Project Strawberry to mimic human-level reasoning and solve hard math problems.

Project Strawberry is not just limited to advanced reasoning, but it can also perform something called Long-horizon Tasks (LHT), according to documents seen by Reuters. Basically, it can also act as an agent and browse the web autonomously, come up with findings, plan, and perform a series of actions.

The Curious Case of Project Strawberry on X

i love summer in the gardenpic.twitter.com/Ter5Z5nFMc— Sam Altman (@sama)August 7, 2024

On August 7, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared an image of strawberry and it raised excitement and curiosity among the community. The next day, an X account (@iruletheworldmo), believed to be an OpenAI staffer, tweeted “welcome to level two. how do you feel? did I make you feel?” Altman commented, “amazing tbh.“amazing tbh— Sam Altman (@sama)August 8, 2024

amazing tbh

Following that, a flurry of cryptic strawberry-related posts was shared by OpenAI staffers on X. Most of the posts allude to Level 2 aka advanced reasoning capability, and Project Strawberry.sf is so backpic.twitter.com/5U8xSXAFXX— roon (@tszzl)August 8, 2024Dinner at@OpenAItonightpic.twitter.com/x0Bhub9jlI— Trevor Creech (@zedlander)August 8, 2024

sf is so backpic.twitter.com/5U8xSXAFXX— roon (@tszzl)August 8, 2024

Dinner at@OpenAItonightpic.twitter.com/x0Bhub9jlI— Trevor Creech (@zedlander)August 8, 2024

Is ChatGPT 5 Finally Coming?

Looking at the development so far, it appears OpenAI is preparing to release the next frontier model pretty soon. Powered by Project Strawberry, the frontier model is likely to bring advanced reasoning capability and unlock agentic workflows. Now whether it will be called GPT-5 or something else, we don’t know. Sam Altman has said before that the successor to the GPT-4 model might not be called GPT-5.

Besides that, it has been over a year sinceGPT-4was released. Meanwhile, Anthropic and Google have almost dethroned OpenAI with their iterative updates. In May 2024, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said the next big thing is coming in 2024 itself. So, the launch seems pretty imminent. Are you ready for that? Let us know in the comments below.

Arjun Sha

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.

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