It is probably just a silly arbitrary codename reference to something like Altman growing strawberries at his house, who knows; but I would doubt that it refers to the counting-letters problem specifically because (1) that is due to BPE tokenization, which has way simpler solutions like byte tokenization, and it’s not at all obvious how any kind of ‘planning’ or self-play RL breakthrough would apply to solving spelling gotcha questions; (2) I think that exact variant of the gotcha showed up after the first reporting of ‘Strawberry’ last year; (3) the reporting about Strawberry implied it was all about math problems like GSM8k, nothing to do with spelling; and (4) there’s plenty of other things that would make a lot more sense as a reference (for example, being a riff off LeCun’s “cherry”—another small red fruit frequently put on top of dessert cakes).
Believe it or not, the name Strawberry does not come from the “How many r’s are in strawberry” meme. We just chose a random word. As far as we know it was a complete coincidence.
(Nor, given what is described of GPT-4 o1 in the release, can I see any way in which it could be a reference to either strawberry problem. Although it does often solve the BPE-related letter-counting problem for ‘strawberry’ specifically, it doesn’t do so perfectly nor does it solve other BPE-related problems.)
Did they name it after the strawberry problem!?
Nope! They named her after me.
</joke>
It is probably just a silly arbitrary codename reference to something like Altman growing strawberries at his house, who knows; but I would doubt that it refers to the counting-letters problem specifically because (1) that is due to BPE tokenization, which has way simpler solutions like byte tokenization, and it’s not at all obvious how any kind of ‘planning’ or self-play RL breakthrough would apply to solving spelling gotcha questions; (2) I think that exact variant of the gotcha showed up after the first reporting of ‘Strawberry’ last year; (3) the reporting about Strawberry implied it was all about math problems like GSM8k, nothing to do with spelling; and (4) there’s plenty of other things that would make a lot more sense as a reference (for example, being a riff off LeCun’s “cherry”—another small red fruit frequently put on top of dessert cakes).
I meant this strawberry problem.
Alright, well, it probably isn’t a reference to that either, because OA’s Noam Brown now says post-o1-release that it was an arbitrary codename which doesn’t refer to anything: https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1834312400419652079
(Nor, given what is described of GPT-4 o1 in the release, can I see any way in which it could be a reference to either strawberry problem. Although it does often solve the BPE-related letter-counting problem for ‘strawberry’ specifically, it doesn’t do so perfectly nor does it solve other BPE-related problems.)