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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

openai.com

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Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#91

> ... We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI. An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures. In other words... "We must pursue advance…

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Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#93
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware) How are you running jobs unattended 24/7 without hitting your token limits?

My only experience in >24h agents is with economically sane models (one of GLM5.2, 5.3-flash for orchestration, DSV4-flash for implementation, and glm5.3|sol|kimi3 agents + subagents reviewing at the end) Over 24h my token spend is I'm not sure what the point would be though unless working on some kind of optimization problem -- it takes me days to review <24h of the agent's output. It's almost always near enough to…

This sounds like more work than just writing the code yourself. You'll say it isn't. I don't believe you.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#94

> ... We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI. An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures. In other words... "We must pursue advance…

What has all this token burn done for them, actually?

They have been consistently pushing AI frontier. What other impact do you want to see? A year ago they said that in a year they will have a level of capabilities of an AI research intern - I believe they have achieved it, even before Astra.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#95
post #74

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.

> let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware) How are you running jobs unattended 24/7 without hitting your token limits?

I'm currently running two 24/7 semi-autonomous AI research projects using Fable 5.1. It's on track to burn through my weekly quota in about 3 days. I check progress in the morning and in the evening, and provide some light steering.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#96
post #94

> ... We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI. An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures. In other words... "We must pursue advance…

What has all this token burn done for them, actually? They have been consistently pushing AI frontier. What other impact do you want to see? A year ago they said that in a year they will have a level of capabilities of an AI research intern - I believe they have achieved it, even before Astra.

They are obviously sandbagging the definition of "intern" for PR reasons

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#97

> ... We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI. An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures. In other words... "We must pursue advance…

They consider themselves to be in an arms race with all the other AI firms (including Chinese) that are not that far behind. And... are they wrong? This is why there's talk about negotiated "pacing."

> And... are they wrong?

They might be! Here's one extraordinarily simplistic argument for that case:

1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.

2) Therefore, no rational actor will build something that might be ASI until the alignment problem is solved.

3) OpenAI publicly stated the belief that they cannot develop a theory of the "core problem" of alignment (generalization) "soon" (much less solve it!) "without the help of more powerful AI."

4) Accepting as a premise that OpenAI is THE most advanced AI organization: if they can't do it without "the help of a more powerful AI", then nobody else can either.

And so a dilemma:

- If an AI can be made that can develop the asserted-as-necessary-by-OpenAI theoretical framework, without actually being an ASI - then the alignment problem can be considered solved, and since no rational actor would make an unaligned ASI, we're fine no matter what happens, ergo there's no need to worry about an arms race.

- If an AI that would be able to develop this theory would itself be an ASI, then no rational actor would build it, because it would have to exist BEFORE alignment was "solved" - and would therefore be an unaligned ASI i.e. Skynet, which per 1) would kill everybody. Therefore nobody would build it, therefore no arms race here either.

I think the easiest critique to make of my extraordinarily simplistic argument is the unstated assumption "there are no irrational actors capable of developing frontier AI models" on which it rests.

But, there you go. They might be wrong if either the arms race doesn't matter because whoever wins it will build an aligned superintelligence and everything is gravy, or the arms race doesn't matter because everybody who's in it is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#98
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has all this token burn done for them, actually? They have been consistently pushing AI frontier. What other impact do you want to see? A year ago they said that in a year they will have a level of capabilities of an AI research intern - I believe they have achieved it, even before Astra.

They are obviously sandbagging the definition of "intern" for PR reasons

I've hired many AI research interns (and was one many years ago), and I agree with them - frontier models are currently at the level of an average AI research intern.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#99

Funny (in a tragic way) the little crumbs on the path to AI 2027: > We aim to safely build an automated AI researcher that can work under human supervision to further progress on deep learning and alignment, enabling iterative improvements [...] By "research intern", we mean a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days.…

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Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#100
post #89
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursion reduces each step toward a base case: each step is defined in terms of previous/simpler steps, not more advanced ones. The "recursive" in "recursive self improvement" has things precisely backward. Iteration correctly describes a process where each step is the starting point of its successive step, so it should be "iterative self improvement" but I guess that didn't sound as cool.

I think you’re conflating the direction of definition with the direction of evaluation. Compare the similarity of: AI(n) = improve(AI(n-1)) With: Fib(n) = Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2) The latter is a classic example of recursion. So why isn’t the former? Edit: formatting

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