Sam Altman: internal "hold-my-beer" channel showed new model crushing hardest research problems
jxnlco · x · 2026-10-29
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, Sam Altman revealed a rare glimpse of OpenAI's internal model testing: one weekend after receiving a new model, an internal Slack channel was named "[model name]-hold-my-beer," where employees threw the hardest research problems of their academic careers at it. He said the model knocked them down one after another across many fields, and many of those problems were later published. Altman admitted he was up most of the night for two nights straight out of excitement — and that he "wasn't supposed to say this."
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