If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
How is it useful to type millions of solutions out that are wrong to come up with the right one? That only works on a research project when youre searching for patterns. If you are trying to code, it needs to be right the first time every time it's run, especially if it's in a production environment.
Especially for programming, you definitely don't need to be right the first time and of course you should never run your code in a production environment for the first time. That would be absolutely reckless.