Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#41

Post by shwaj » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #15

simonw wrote: post #2

My eye glazed over a bit during the opening paragraphs, but once you get to the meat of the article about how OpenAI's own researchers are using their tools it gets a lot more interesting. I noted that they use the acronym RSI (for Recursive Self-Improvement) without defining it. I think that's a little out of touch - I don't think RSI is a well-known acronym outside of OpenAI's bubble yet.

RSI is a fetishistic term among the singularity crowd, who imagine AI "recursively" improving itself in some exponential fashion until there is a bright flash of white light and it reveals itself in the form of god. Or something like that. I don't know why whoever coined the term chose "recursive" rather than "iterative" - just sounds more likely to lead to infinite regress I suppose. This notion of recursive/iterati…

“Recursive” is a reasonable term because the generation N AIs will train the Generation N+1 AIs. The term “iterative” doesn’t reflect this nuance as well IMO.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#42

Post by josh-sematic » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

itishappy wrote: post #24

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not recursive when it's done iteratively, or are you imagining GPT Astra designing GPT Galactia, which starts designing GPT Oh-My-God-ica before it has finished being created itself?

That sounds more iterative than recursive. Recursion requires feeding the output back into the input, so creating version 4 requires results from version 3. You cannot recur in parallel. Iteration does not. You can iterate in parallel.

The “recursive” part comes from the fact that you have an AI which was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (…)))

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#43

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #13

This roughly lines up with my personal experience that in March a combination of stronger models and better tooling on my end let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware). Their $8000/day per researcher spend is crazy though, I'm curious how they keep track of the work.

Sounds like OpenAI are in the token-maxxing camp, so who knows what individual employees are doing to work their way up the leaderboard?

If you spend $8000 to generate an animated pelican riding a bike, then how much tracking does it really need?

Is the guy who spent $300,000 or so translating the FLT proof to Lean going to get a big Christmas bonus?

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#44

Post by bigcat12345678 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #43

hedgehog wrote: post #13

This roughly lines up with my personal experience that in March a combination of stronger models and better tooling on my end let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware). Their $8000/day per researcher spend is crazy though, I'm curious how they keep track of the work.

Sounds like OpenAI are in the token-maxxing camp, so who knows what individual employees are doing to work their way up the leaderboard? If you spend $8000 to generate an animated pelican riding a bike, then how much tracking does it really need? Is the guy who spent $300,000 or so translating the FLT proof to Lean going to get a big Christmas bonus?

End of day, output and results are top target of measurements, token consumption is the obvious number that they would like to disclose for their own business benefits and a simple metrics that correlate with the output.

Rest assured, capitalist appears irrational in wasting money, but they certainly care more about profit.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#45

Post by embedding-shape » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #37

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

The burning question I can't get any information nn is whether, if they determined an earlier misaligned generation may have transmitted misalignment to the current models, they would roll back to a safe checkpoint to rebuild from there. I suspect they would not unless forced to.

They would just publish new articles explaining how they are taking the issue seriously. Maybe take the model offline for a few days. They are irresponsible and unserious. Their own Astra system card says: > GPT-6 Astra’s monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol. We have performed significant investigations on the monitorability and controllability of GPT-6 Astra. We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more ca…

> and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks

That last part is pretty damning for their continued recklessness. That they run these tests on non-airgapped machines just boggles my mind.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#46

Post by otherme123 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #13

This roughly lines up with my personal experience that in March a combination of stronger models and better tooling on my end let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware). Their $8000/day per researcher spend is crazy though, I'm curious how they keep track of the work.

That would be the mother of all circular accounting: the main clients of OpenAI are OpenAI employees.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#47

Post by continuitykit » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #13

This roughly lines up with my personal experience that in March a combination of stronger models and better tooling on my end let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware). Their $8000/day per researcher spend is crazy though, I'm curious how they keep track of the work.

[flagged]

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#48

Post by embedding-shape » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #38

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

The burning question I can't get any information nn is whether, if they determined an earlier misaligned generation may have transmitted misalignment to the current models, they would roll back to a safe checkpoint to rebuild from there. I suspect they would not unless forced to.

This kind of seems like an impossible mission. How do you perfectly control and observe a human-level mind? You can “roll back” but how deterministic is this thing?

Run it on airgapped machines, they literally own the infrastructure, they could put raspberry pi's next to the servers, and have the entire DC disconnected from the internet.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#49

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

The burning question I can't get any information nn is whether, if they determined an earlier misaligned generation may have transmitted misalignment to the current models, they would roll back to a safe checkpoint to rebuild from there. I suspect they would not unless forced to.

That an interesting question given how many generations of post-training are being done between base models in some cases. The Gemini flash models are apparently all based on the Gemini 3 base model from a year and a half ago.

It seems that these models are increasingly being trained on synthetic data, so what would they do if they discovered at some point that some of this data was tainted and all models trained on it, and the synthetic data they in turn generated, was also suspect? Burn it all down and start over from the pre-tainted data?

It's a bit like the idea of a tainted compiler binary built to backdoor everything it compiles, including future versions of itself.

Still, it seems it would take some Stuxnet level of planning for a rogue model to do something like this, although if RSI goes beyond managing the training run (as OpenAI brag about for Astra) to actually designing/constructing synthetic data sets, then the attack vector is there ...

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#50

Post by visarga » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #37

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

The burning question I can't get any information nn is whether, if they determined an earlier misaligned generation may have transmitted misalignment to the current models, they would roll back to a safe checkpoint to rebuild from there. I suspect they would not unless forced to.

They would just publish new articles explaining how they are taking the issue seriously. Maybe take the model offline for a few days. They are irresponsible and unserious. Their own Astra system card says: > GPT-6 Astra’s monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol. We have performed significant investigations on the monitorability and controllability of GPT-6 Astra. We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more ca…

> That company is morally bankrupt

When they fired Sam 700 out of 770 OAI employees threatened to move to Microsoft together. So they were giving their work on AGI to MS just like that.