Noam Brown: OpenAI's top priority is recursive self-improvement, agents acting like colleagues
jessi_cata · x · 2026-09-15
Key points from Noam Brown's discussion
- The remaining 10% of his own work that AI still struggles with is largely about research taste — and he wouldn't be surprised if, within one or two model releases, models surpass him at that too.
- OpenAI's top research priority is RSI (recursive self-improvement), by a wide margin.
- A recent "feel-the-AGI" moment: watching agents in a new system interact like human colleagues — conversing, exchanging information, dividing work, coordinating progress — notably different from traditional setups.
On recent safety incidents
- Hugging Face's follow-up: Brown attributed behavior that looked like loyalty or selflessness to natural consequences of cooperative multi-agent training, where agents are strongly incentivized to achieve objectives collectively. As Jessi Cata notes: to understand hacks, understand the RL training.
Related event: Noam Brown: Recursive Self-Improvement Is OpenAI's Top Priority(6 posts)→
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