Been following the story, mostly on twitter don't know if any of this is true but at this point it is just pure entertainment reading some of the speculative theories:

https://twitter.com/YourFirstAI/status/1727661862781612215

If Q* is what I think it is… this is absolutely BONKERS

Q-learning has existed for decades already. It’s just a basic reinforcement learning algorithm. A* is also fairly old- it’s a heuristic-based path finding algorithm.

In typical engineering fashion, they may have found an intersection of the 2 and named it Q*. This is total speculation, but if this is a “breakthrough” that means OAI built an algorithm that can feed a highly efficient heuristic into Q-learning. That is MASSIVE.