OpenCUA author: the 450-step Paint demo we rejected 2 years ago is now doable by agents

andersonbcdefg · x · 2026-09-06

OpenCUA co-author Bowen Wang recalls rejecting a human demo submitted two years ago that spent 300 steps drawing a sunflower in Windows Paint and 150 more coloring it — deemed an insane task useless for training computer-use agents.

Two years later, he's watching Astra take a portrait photo and autonomously draw the person inside Apple Notes on a Mac. "The game has changed."

OpenCUA itself is an open-source CUA framework from HKU's XLANG Lab, Moonshot AI, Stanford and others, featuring an annotation infrastructure, the AgentNet dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ apps/websites, and a pipeline converting demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long chain-of-thought reasoning.

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