On November 22, a few days after OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman, The Information reported that OpenAI had made a technical breakthrough that would allow it to “Develop far more powerful artificial intelligence models.” Dubbed Q* the new model was “Able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before.” Reuters reported that several OpenAI staffers sent the board a letter “Warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.” However, “Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter,” and subsequent reporting hasn’t connected Altman’s firing to concerns over Q. The Information reported that earlier this year, OpenAI built “Systems that could solve basic math problems, a difficult task for existing AI models.” Reuters described Q as “Performing math on the level of grade-school students.” In a famous January 2022 paper, Google researchers pointed out that large language models produce better results if they are prompted to reason one step at a time.

Source: The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project