Shortly after Hunter Lightman joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2022, he watched his colleagues launch ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing products ever. Meanwhile, Lightman quietly worked on a team teaching OpenAI’s models to solve high school math competitions.
Today that team, known as MathGen, is considered instrumental to OpenAI’s industry-leading effort to create AI reasoning models: the core technology behind AI agents that can do tasks on a computer like a human would.
“We were trying to make the models better at mathematical reasoning, which at the time they weren’t very good at,” Lightman told TechCrunch, describing MathGen’s early work.
OpenAI’s models are far from perfect today — the company’s latest AI systems still hallucinate and its agents struggle with complex tasks.
But its state-of-the-art models have improved significantly on mathematical reasoning. One of OpenAI’s models recently won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad, a math competition for the world’s brightest high school students. OpenAI believes these reasoning capabilities will translate to other subjects, and ultimately power general-purpose agents that the company has always dreamed of building.
ChatGPT was a happy accident — a lowkey research preview turned viral consumer business — but OpenAI’s agents are the product of a years-long, deliberate effort within the company.
“Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the company’s first developer conference in 2023. “These capabilities are often talked about in the AI field as agents. The upsides of this are going to be tremendous.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California.(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Image Credits:Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Whether agents will meet Altman’s vision remains to be seen, but OpenAI shocked the world with the release of its first AI reasoning model, o1, in the fall of 2024. Less than a year later, the 21 foundational researchers behind tha …