OpenAI released its most advanced AI model yet, called o1, for paying users on Thursday. The launch kicked off the company's "12 Days of OpenAI" event--a dozen consecutive releases to celebrate the holiday season. OpenAI has touted o1's "complex reasoning" capabilities, and announced on Thursday that unlimited access to the model would cost 200 per month. In the video the company released to show the model's strengths, a user uploads a picture of a wooden birdhouse and asks the model for advice on how to build a similar one. The model "thinks" for a short period and then spits out what on the surface appears to be a comprehensive set of instructions. Close examination reveals the instructions to be almost useless.

Having installed the public beta of macOS Sierra, I am staggered by this - it's not image recognition of a photo that finds a building in it, or something like that. I have some 27,000 photos and videos in my library - I was curious to see if it would find images of birds - so that's what I typed in to the search box. While I was doing that it made two suggestions - birds and birdhouse. Out of curiosity I clicked the birdhouse one. There are two things in there - a photo and a video.