Behind the Revolution of AI Agents at OpenAI: The New Age of Reasoning:

OpenAI is transforming our thinking process of artificial intelligence. The start-up that has produced ChatGPT is working on AI agents that can think like human beings. 

These agents are intended to do complicated operations on the computer, i.e., everything from solving math problems to making decisions. This has been done quite rapidly and encouragingly, but it is still not without challenge.

MathGen and the Birth of Reasoning Models:

The team started small, something MathGen had to change its ways with. As the world marveled at ChatGPT, this group was already training AI to solve math problems at a high school level. 

Researcher Hunter Lightman and his team worked on enhancing the reasoning prowess of the models, which was a drawback before. The result of this work was a key accomplishment: one of the models developed by OpenAI achieved a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad. 

The victory demonstrated just how much progress the reasoning of the AI had made and helped OpenAI to have faith in applying the methodology in other categories.

The Breakthrough: Strawberry and o1:

In the year 2023, OpenAI reached its peak. They took a mix of a variety of methods and technologies–large language models, reinforcement learning (RL), and something called test-time computation. 

Such a combination gave rise to a new system, namely, the strawberry. It allowed AI to work and think slowly and carefully, and review its solutions prior to providing an answer. Strawberry opened the door to the first reasoning model of OpenAI, o1. 

This model not only answered questions but also backtracked, planned, and exhibited thought-like properties. Scientists were astonished. This was the first time that AI appeared to be able to think as humans think.

Models to Agents- The Next Step:

OpenAI organized another team, called the Agents, led by Daniel Selsam, after this success. They aimed to harness the power of O1 in creating agents that could do things on behalf of users. This is what OpenAI’s current vision is all about: a future where you do not work as hard as you do now because computers do all the work for you. 

By this point, the company had begun to switch resources, both GPUs and talent, to the enhancement of o1. Projects like this became one of the most significant projects of open AI due to its leaders, such as Ilya Sutskever and Jakub Pachocki.

Scaling Reasoning to Actual Applications:

The answer to how AI can be made to be considerably better is by granting it more authority, not only during training but also when solving problems. This can also be termed as test-time computation. 

The more data used, the better the models should be, but rather than speed up the process, OpenAI found out that what was lacking was time to think and tools.

The reasoning models today are used in the AI agents that can create code, such as Codex by OpenAI. However, the general-purpose agents are not much better at work that is ambiguous or subjective, such as assisting a person in finding a good parking space or choosing their clothes.

The next step is what can be called subjective thinking and GPT-5:

People such as Noam Brown are currently in the process of teaching AI to do subjective tasks, in other words, things where there is no objective answer. This is a problematic issue since it is not easy to determine whether the AI is performing well. 

However, new approaches to reinforcement learning are promising. The advances are likely to be incorporated in the next major model of OpenAI, GPT-5. The new model is expected to be more powerful, have better planning, and think smarter about what people want, even when they have not made it clear.

It is the Race of the Century:

OpenAI is not the only one anymore. Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all working on their respective reasoning agents. Even some companies have snatched the hottest researchers out of OpenAI at vast salaries. The AI race is getting bigger every day. Nevertheless, OpenAI is confident that it can remain ahead in this game by being able to create agents capable of understanding the users well and performing with little effort. 

The vision is that in the future, you will have an AI that will allow almost anything online to be done with the help of the machine. The question, however, will be which of them will arrive first?