OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki: We Will See Machines Smarter Than Humans in Our Lifetime
oran_ge · x · 2026-09-07
In "An Alien Mind" on OpenAI's site, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki recounts the 2023 RLSlow breakthrough that proved reasoning models could scale—and the night he and Szymon Sidor digested that machines smarter than humans would arrive in their lifetime. Key claims: progress can extend to RSI (AI driving its own improvement); AI is "grown, not designed," with scale converting compute into capability since 2017; new algorithms were largely byproducts of scaling. OpenAI will pursue alignment, monitoring, and defensive systems, and unilaterally pause scaling if needed—but says that alone won't suffice.
Related event: OpenAI Chief Scientist's "An Alien Mind" Essay Urges Global Slowdown of AI(51 posts)→
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