Saw a video of Altman talking about this progress. The argument was basically that this is a big leap on theoretical grounds. Although it might seem trivial to laymen that it can do some grade school math now, it shows that it can come up with a single answer to a problem rather than just running its mouth and spouting plausible-sounding BS like GPT does.
Once they have a system capable of settling on a single correct answer through its own reasoning rather than yet another probability, it it gets much easier to build better and better AI with a series of incremental improvements. Without this milestone they might've just kept on building LLM's all with the same fundamental limitations, no matter how much computing power they add to them.
I'm excited for when it can use it's large knowledge of data, science, research papers etc to understand the world so well that it'll be coming up with new technologies, ideas, answers to hard problems.
Once they have a system capable of settling on a single correct answer through its own reasoning rather than yet another probability, it it gets much easier to build better and better AI with a series of incremental improvements. Without this milestone they might've just kept on building LLM's all with the same fundamental limitations, no matter how much computing power they add to them.