Researchers Created an Open Rival To OpenAI's o1 'Reasoning' Model for Under $50

AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI 'reasoning' model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a research paper. From a report: The model, known as s1, performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, on tests measuring math and coding abilities. The s1 model is available on GitHub, along with the data and code used to train it.

The team behind s1 said they started with an off-the-shelf base model, then fine-tuned it through distillation, a process to extract the 'reasoning' capabilities from another AI model by training on its answers. The researchers said s1 is distilled from one of Google's reasoning models, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Distillation is the same approach Berkeley researchers used to create an AI reasoning model for around $450 last month.

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