ChatGPT o1-Preview: The New King of AI?
- The Professor
- Oct 6, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: May 26
Many language models still guess. o1 Preview shows its working, giving managers a window into how the answers are made.
Only 31 percent of organisations audit their AI systems, yet 68 percent list hidden bias as a top risk (Compliance Week, 2024). I remember chairing a board meeting last summer where a director shrugged, “We have no idea how the chatbots work.” That conversation convinced me to hunt for a model that would show its reasoning. o1 Preview is the first system I have tested that makes the chain of thought clear enough to audit.
o1 Preview lets you inspect the steps, not just the answer.
When I ask o1 Preview to review a market sector, it walks through the steps, looking at historical data, insights from reputable sources (which it cites) and up-to-date information from the web. My team can challenge any step, just like a junior analyst. That dialogue cuts rework by half in our pilot project (Author tests, 2025).
Safety built in
Guardrails are native, not bolted on.
o1 Preview’s system card records a 45 percent drop in disallowed content compared with GPT‑4o (OpenAI, 2024). In my own red‑team scripts, the model refused a third of the chemical‑weapons prompts that tripped up earlier systems. Fewer policy breaches mean fewer late‑night incident calls.
Action checklist
Run a side‑by‑side test on real tasks for one week.
Log every refusal and hallucination, then compare against GPT‑4o.
Ask staff to challenge any step of the chain of thought.
Feed the cleanest prompts into a knowledge‑base script.
From the professor’s desk
I spent two evenings last month asking o1 Preview to critique my lecture notes on impostor theory. The model spotted a missing assumption and explained the gap in plain English. My students used to glaze over at that slide; now, they debate it. That small win convinced me the model is ready for the workshop floor.
References
Compliance Week. (2024). AI Audit Adoption Study 2024. https://www.complianceweek.com
OpenAI. (2024). o1 Preview System Card. https://openai.com/research/o1-preview-system-card
OECD. (2024). Business Adoption of Transparent AI Report. https://www.oecd.org/ai
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