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If you thought the recent GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini releases were enough to keep OpenAI busy, think again. The release of a new LLM codenamed "Strawberry" might be just around the corner. 

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On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a photo of a strawberry garden on X, accompanied by the cryptic caption, "i love summer in the garden," as seen below. 

i love summer in the garden pic.twitter.com/Ter5Z5nFMc

- Sam Altman (@sama) August 7, 2024

At face value, you might think this is just an appreciation post for a wholesome summer activity. However, like most of Sam Altman's cryptic tweets, this is likely an Easter egg pointing towards something larger -- Project Strawberry. 

Immediately, the AI afficionados took to the comment section to decode the post. One user counted the strawberries in the picture, which totaled five, and correlated it to a possible release of GPT-5. However, most others landed on the same conclusion, that the post confirms a Project Strawberry release this summer. 

Here is everything we know about Project Strawberry and what you can expect.

What exactly is Project Strawberry?

In May, Reuters obtained an internal OpenAI document that showed that OpenAI is working on a project codenamed Strawberry. In that internal document, Strawberry was said to be a model with advanced reasoning capabilities that could be used for deep research by navigating the internet autonomously and reliably.

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This project is the same as Q*, a new, in-progress model whose rumors began circulating in November 2023. At that time, Reuters reported that some OpenAI employees regarded Q* as a breakthrough in artificial general intelligence (AGI). 

Even though the Reuters report did not share any insights as to when the model would be released, new developments, in addition to the Sam Altman X post shown above, have caused people to speculate that it may be closer to being released than we thought. 

Where can Project Strawberry be accessed?

A new mystery model, "anonymous-chatbot," appeared on the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS) Chatbot Arena. Testers share that it is particularly good at advanced reasoning, better than preceding models, even OpenAI's latest and greatest GPT-4o. 

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When a user tried asking the model what it was, it didn't explicitly say whether it was Q* or Strawberry. However, it did say it was based on OpenAI's GPT-4 architecture, as seen by the screenshot of the user's experience in the X post below. 

New model on arena again. It is simply named 'anonymous-chatbot' this time. There is speculation already that this is Q*. Whatever it is, something new is on the way. https://t.co/Zvpr2XUSxG

- Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) August 7, 2024

The model being on the arena is particularly noteworthy because OpenAI previously tested GPT-4o on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena two weeks before releasing it to the public, also under a vague name. Sam Altman also cryptically teased the model via an X post then. If Strawberry follows that pattern, a release will happen soon.  

Even though there is no guarantee that this mystery model is Strawberry, if you want to try it out, you can visit the website, click on Arena battle, and enter sample prompts until 'anonymous-chatbot' comes up. A Reddit user shared that they spent "1-2 hours on Arena to get a shot at testing 'anonymous-chatbot,'" so proceed cautiously. 

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