Reasoning with o1

Learn how to effectively prompt and use OpenAI’s o1 model in Reasoning with o1, a short course built in collaboration with OpenAI and taught by Colin Jarvis, Head of AI Solutions at OpenAI.

The o1 model is exceptionally good at abstract reasoning tasks. It has record-breaking performance on tasks such as planning, coding, analyzing, domain-specific reasoning like law, and other STEM subjects.

In this course, you will learn how OpenAI utilized reinforcement learning to produce a model that uses ‘test-time compute’ to improve performance on many reasoning tasks. Learn what ‘chain-of-thought’ prompting is and how o1 autonomously utilizes it to break problems into smaller steps, try multiple strategies, and think through responses before returning them.

In detail, you’ll: 

• Learn to recognize what tasks the o1 model is suited for and when you might want to use a smaller or faster model or combine those two.
• Understand four key principles of prompting using o1 from “simple and direct” to “show rather than tell,” and explore the difference in performance.
• Implement a multi-step task in which o1 acts as an orchestrator creating a plan and handing it over to the 4o-mini model to execute the plan in sequence, balancing the trade-off between intelligence and cost.
• Use o1 for a coding task to build a new application, edit existing code, and test performance by running a coding competition between o1-mini and GPT 4o.
• Use o1 for image understanding and learn how it performs better with a hierarchy of reasoning, in which it incurs the latency and cost upfront, preprocessing the image and indexing it with rich details so it can be used for Q&A later.
• Learn a technique called meta-prompting, in which you use o1 to improve your prompts. Using a customer support evaluation set, you iteratively use o1 to modify a prompt to improve performance.

Start building applications that require complex reasoning with o1.

It’s helpful to be familiar with Python and have a basic understanding of LLM prompting and LLM application development.