Despite the personnel turmoil at OpenAI, the company's co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, appears to be indifferent - he even shared a photo on his personal page on the social media platform X, showing lush strawberries growing in a garden pot, accompanied by his signature all-lowercase style message: "I love summer gardens."

At first glance, this scene seems warm and ordinary, but unexpectedly, it has sparked enthusiastic responses from Altman's fans and members of the AI community on X. The reason is that Altman's action is interpreted as a subtle response to the "Strawberry" project, a new foundational model being developed by OpenAI. This project, rumored to be comparable to the highly anticipated GPT-5 foundational model, has long been a hot topic in the industry.

"Do we need any additional hints?" asked @kimmonismus, a well-known account in the field of AI rumors and information sharing, on X.

Bindu Reddy, CEO of the open-source AI startup Abacus AI, also spoke out on X, confirming that this is a "tacit mention of the Strawberry project."

In addition, a more eye-catching news is the recent appearance of an "anonymous chatbot" AI model on the popular open-source lmsys platform. This platform is often used by AI model vendors, including OpenAI itself, as a frontier for testing upcoming products with users. When asked about its identity, this new model claims to be a member of the OpenAI GPT-4 series, with a language style reminiscent of the "gpt2-chatbot" on lmsys before the release of the GPT-4o multimodal model.

Early testers have provided feedback that this "anonymous chatbot" demonstrates reasoning abilities beyond GPT-4o and other cutting-edge models, indicating that it may have even more powerful performance.

Rumors about OpenAI's upcoming release of a powerful new model can be traced back to a Reuters report in November 2023. The report mentioned a new AI model called "Q*" (pronounced "Q-Star"), which some insiders at OpenAI see as a significant breakthrough towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), an autonomous system that can surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

Subsequently, in an exclusive report in mid-July 2024, Reuters further revealed that OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is exploring new development paths for its AI models through a project called "Strawberry."

As for the specific innovations that "Strawberry" may bring, Reuters quoted insiders as saying that the project aims to enable OpenAI's AI to not only answer queries but also engage in thorough pre-planning, allowing it to autonomously and reliably conduct "deep research" on the internet.

Since the release of their previous major foundational model, GPT-4, nearly 17 months have quietly passed, which is approximately a year and a half. During this period, although OpenAI has introduced new foundational models, such as GPT-4o and its mini version (with GPT-4o being a native multimodal training model), the competition has become increasingly fierce as competitors like Anthropic, Google, and Meta have released equally powerful or even superior models in certain tasks.