Alibaba is making AI news again, releasing another Qwen reasoning model, QwQ-32B, which was trained and scaled using reinforcement learning (RL). The Qwen team says it “has the potential to enhance model performance beyond conventional pretraining and post-training methods.” QwQ-32B, a 32 billion parameter model, “achieves performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1, which boasts 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated),” Alibaba claims. While parameters refer to the total set of adjustable weights and biases in the model’s neural network, “activated” parameters are a subset used for a specific inference task, like generating a response. Continue reading Alibaba Says Qwen Reasoning Model on Par with DeepSeek

OpenAI has decided to simplify its product offerings. A month after announcing the in-development GPT-o3 as its next frontier model, the company has canceled it as a standalone release, explaining that it would be integrated into the upcoming GPT-5 instead. “A top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman wrote in a social media post this week. Expected to ship later this year, the GPT-5 models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research and more, OpenAI says. Continue reading Sam Altman Reveals Plans to Simplify OpenAI’s Product Line

Model training continues to hit new lows in terms of cost, a phenomenon known as the commoditization of AI that has rocked Wall Street. An AI reasoning model created for under $50 in cloud compute credits is reportedly performing comparably to established reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 on tests of math and coding aptitude. Called s1-32B, it was created by researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington by customizing Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, feeding it 1,000 prompts with responses sourced from Google’s new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental reasoning model. Continue reading Reasoning Model Competes with Advanced AI at a Lower Cost

OpenAI has unveiled a new frontier model, OpenAI o3, which it claims can “reason” through challenges involving math, science and computer programming. Available to safety and research testers, it is expected to be available to individuals and businesses this year. OpenAI o3 is said to be over 20 percent more efficient at common programming tasks than its predecessor OpenAI o1 and beat a company scientist on a programming test. Model o3 is part of a broader effort to create AI systems that can reason through complex problems. In late December Google debuted a similar platform, the experimental Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Mode. Continue reading OpenAI Previews Two New Reasoning Models: o3 and o3-Mini

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Pro, a $200 per month subscription plan that provides unlimited access to the full version of o1, its new large reasoning model, and all other OpenAI models. The toolkit includes o1-mini, GPT-4o and Advanced Voice. It also includes the new o1 pro mode, “a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems,” OpenAI explains, describing the high-end subscription plan as a path to “research-grade intelligence” for a way for scientists, engineers, enterprise, academics and others who use AI to accelerate productivity. Continue reading OpenAI Announces $200 Monthly Subscription for ChatGPT Pro

Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Continue reading Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model

The OpenAI board’s Safety and Security Committee will become an independent board oversight committee, chaired by Zico Kolter, machine learning department chair at Carnegie Mellon University. The committee will be responsible for “the safety and security processes guiding OpenAI’s model deployment and development.” Three OpenAI board members segue from their current SSC roles to the new committee: Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, former Sony Corporation EVP Nicole Seligman and erstwhile NSA chief Paul Nakasone. OpenAI is currently putting together a new funding round that reportedly aims to value the company at $150 billion. Continue reading OpenAI Bestows Independent Oversight on Safety Committee

OpenAI is previewing a new series of AI models that can reason and correct complex coding mistakes, providing a more efficient solution for developers. Powered by OpenAI o1, the new models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond, much like a person would,” and as a result can “solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math,” OpenAI claims, noting that “through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.” The first model in the series is being released in preview in OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and in the company’s API. Continue reading OpenAI Previews New LLMs Capable of Complex Reasoning