OpenAI researcher explains the gap between internal and external views of AI progress
ResultBackground2450 · reddit · 2026-09-13
OpenAI researcher Adam Majmudar published a long post addressing claims that the past two weeks look like coordinated regulatory capture, arguing there's a large gap between internal and external perceptions of AI progress speed. Key points: outsiders judge progress by a few big jumps (GPT3, GPT4, o1/o3, DeepSeek R1, Fable/Mythos, Kimi K3, Astra) and infer a 'scaling wall'; inside labs, researchers see scaling-law plots directly. He argues a decade of capability gains came from only two mechanisms—scaling further on an existing law or discovering a new one—so 'how much further can we scale' is really 'how many unsaturated scaling axes remain'. If new axes exist, such as SSI's rumored test-time training breakthrough or scaling agent-cluster collaboration, the wall isn't there.
Related event: Why Lab Insiders Suddenly Fear AI: Real Threat or Regulatory Capture(5 posts)→
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