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Can a well-designed prompt outperform OpenAI's o1 model?

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Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Human-written prompts can still beat o1’s automated reasoning processes.

Yes. A well-designed prompt, meaning the human writes the instruction, can, so far, outpace OpenAI’s o1. This is noteworthy because o1 is designed specifically for reasoning through an iterative, self-calling process with dedicated steps for iteration, reflection, and feedback loops. The fact that careful human-written prompts can still exceed its performance suggests that the model’s reasoning capabilities, while advanced, have not yet surpassed what skilled human prompt engineering can achieve.

— Sam Altman Says, ‘We Know How To Build AGI’ — Not So Fast · Forbes


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