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I recently came across Sequoia Capital's latest article, "Generative AI's Act o1: The Reasoning Era Begins," and it offers a fascinating view into AI's evolution. We’re shifting from rapid pattern matching to a new frontier of reasoning—moving from "thinking fast" to "thinking slow."

Just like Deep Thought’s famous deliberation in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, AI's power now lies in its ability to pause, evaluate, and reason, resembling System 2 thinking. Here’s what caught my attention:

• System 1 thinking, characterized by pre-trained models mimicking patterns, has been instrumental in the development of AI. However,
• System 2 thinking, focusing on deliberate reasoning and problem-solving, is now taking center stage. This shift allows AI to move beyond simple pattern recognition and tackle more complex problems that require deep thinking and creative solutions.

The article highlights OpenAI's o1 (formerly known as Q* or Strawberry) as the first model to demonstrate true general reasoning capabilities through "inference-time compute." This means the model is designed to "stop and think" before providing a response, enabling deeper reasoning capabilities.

While replicating AlphaGo's success in reasoning within LLMs presents challenges, particularly in defining a value function to score responses, the article suggests exciting developments in reinforcement learning techniques. This points to a future where deep reinforcement learning plays a crucial role in enhancing AI's reasoning abilities.

Sequoia Capital's analysis provides a compelling roadmap for the future of AI, emphasizing the importance of:

• Inference clouds: environments capable of scaling compute dynamically based on task complexity.
• Custom cognitive architectures: specialized systems designed to mimic human thinking for specific tasks and domains.
• Agentic applications: a new breed of applications focused on automating work and delivering services rather than just software.

The article concludes by suggesting that AI's true potential might lie in its ability to both automate work and potentially even replace traditional software, just as SaaS revolutionized the software industry. It's an exciting time to be following the developments in AI, and Sequoia Capital's article provides valuable insights into the direction this transformative technology is headed.

I really enjoyed the article and loved the coverage from Nathaniel Whittemore on my favourite AI podcast, The AI Daily Brief .