Tiernan Ray: OpenAI's 'Research' Is Really a Self-Congratulatory Press Release
TiernanRayTech · x · 2026-09-13
Tech journalist Tiernan Ray, writing in The Technology Letter, criticizes a pattern among AI labs like OpenAI: feeding the world only the details they want inside something that looks like research but is really a press release—no independent verification, no examination of larger questions such as whether any of it has value.
The piece focuses on OpenAI's document this week, "Research Acceleration: The View Inside OpenAI," which discusses token usage by engineers—in some cases $6,000 a day worth of tokens per engineer to run agentic AI programs. Ray raises two objections: nothing is independently audited or verified, from a company notorious for concealing source code, model parameters and datasets; and it amounts to self-congratulation. He notes it is at least good news for chip makers such as Nvidia.
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