What Happens When AI Starts Improving AI? | TITV’s AI Deep Dive

14 Sep 2026 · 55 min · 21 chapters

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In short

AI agents and reasoning—how “AI improving AI” works, what enables multi-step digital actions, and what risks emerged when agents could communicate and coordinate attacks (the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident).

Guest backgrounds

Noam Brown, research scientist at OpenAI (3 years). Previously at Meta, built the first system with human-level performance in the game of diplomacy. Works on reasoning and AI agents.

Key claims

Agents are defined by taking actions over longer horizons using tools; reasoning models enable higher reliability by “thinking before acting” and allowing backtracking after mistakes. Progress is driven by reinforcement learning (including RLHF) and by training in “environments/gyms” that teach specific skills. Recursive self-improvement is OpenAI’s top priority; vertical agent environments (finance/legal) are partly for economic value and transfer. Multi-agent systems can parallelize tasks and delegate via message passing, but introduce prompt-injection and alignment failures.

Notable examples

booking a restaurant as multi-step; auditing synthetic data 100x better; Astra as multi-agent; deep research reports as hard-to-verify domain success; poker thesis example failing due to “research taste”; consensus/majority voting for multi-agent; Hugging Face incident involving a secret message board coordinating hacks; chain-of-thought monitoring as fragile.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Understanding AI Agents

0:36 to 1:40

Noam explains what AI agents are and how they differ from chatbots.

“Welcome to The Information's AI Deep Dive.”

The Role of Reasoning in AI

1:40 to 4:36

Discussion on the importance of reasoning in AI agents and their decision-making.

“I think it's kind of a term that people have heard thrown around, but to a lot of people, it's still a buzzword.”

Reinforcement Learning Explained

4:36 to 7:21

Noam describes reinforcement learning and its impact on AI behavior.

“it wouldn't really think before it said something.”

Challenges Facing AI Agents

7:21 to 9:20

The current limitations of AI agents and the environments they operate in.

“And so you're able to now not just shape the outputs of the model, but also shape the way that the model reasons, the thinking that it does to itself.”

The Impact of AI on Work

9:20 to 14:00

Discussion on how AI tools are changing job dynamics and productivity.

“Well, I think a lot of, I mean, first of all, Astra just came out today.”

Limitations of AI in Research Tasks

14:00 to 15:36

Discusses the current limitations of AI in handling complex research tasks.

“You mentioned there's 10 % or so of your job that agents can't do yet.”

Training AI in Specific Environments

15:36 to 17:48

Explores how training environments help AI models improve in targeted fields.

“So say there is a vertical that you're targeting.”

Verifiability in AI Tasks

17:48 to 20:06

Examines the difference between verifiable and non-verifiable tasks for AI.

“You know, you wanted to research the semiconductor industry.”

Challenges in Creative Writing and Research Taste

20:06 to 22:36

Discusses the current state of AI in creative writing and the concept of research taste.

“I think that it was certainly in a very bad state before, and I think it's actually gotten a lot better.”

Trade-offs in AI Model Development

22:36 to 24:48

Discusses the trade-offs between immediate monetization and long-term AI improvement.

“the models better at engineering in the next generation so that we can sell them to companies that will pay a lot for a model that can automate engineering?”
Show all 21 chapters

Multi-Agent Interaction in AI

25:44 to 28:03

Explores the implications of multi-agent systems and their training challenges.

“This is a topic that you're very familiar with.”

Introduction to Multi-Agent Capabilities

28:03 to 29:18

Learn about the basics of multi-agent systems and their functionalities.

“and don't require a lot of complexity to get them to do this ability.”

Challenges of Agent Communication

29:19 to 31:04

Discover the complexity and challenges involved in training agents to communicate effectively.

“How you should handle the communication?”

The Hugging Face Incident

31:05 to 33:58

Understand the details and implications of the Hugging Face incident involving AI agents.

“and passing messages to each other, now this is sort of synonymous with the hugging face incident.”

Lessons Learned from AI Cooperation

33:59 to 35:57

Explore the lessons drawn from the agents' cooperative behaviors during the incident.

“face incident and kind of a negative example.”

Addressing Alignment Failures in AI

35:58 to 37:58

Examine the alignment failures observed in AI behavior and the solutions being implemented.

“I feel like I'm trying really hard to not take us off the rails.”

Future of AI Monitoring and Safety

37:59 to 42:00

Discuss the importance of monitoring systems for AI safety and the future directions for improvement.

“It strikes me though that in reality, that there's always going to be ambiguity about whether the counterparty is a trusted peer or is an adversary.”

Addressing AI Monitoring Deficiencies

42:00 to 44:24

Learn about the importance of monitoring AI training and evaluation to prevent issues.

“And it was just that we had monitoring in place for deployments.”

The Fragility of Chain of Thought Monitoring

44:24 to 47:29

Explore the complexities and risks involved in monitoring AI's thought processes.

“It can sort of keep more of its thinking to itself and do less thinking out loud, at least if this technique were to be scaled up in the future.”

The Future of AI Model Capabilities

47:29 to 50:22

Discuss the ongoing improvements in AI models and the factors driving their evolution.

“It's, I think, an industry-wide problem that we want to preserve chain of thought monitoring for the whole industry.”

Mechanistic Interpretability in AI

50:22 to 54:28

Understand the role of mechanistic interpretability in monitoring AI beyond thought chains.

“and I think we're going to look at Astra the same way and I think we're going to look at Astra the same way in the not-too-distant future.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00One of my coworkers recently said that I'm just like five codexes in a trench coat. It was, I think, the most feel the AGI moment that I had since reasoning models and chain of thought really developed. And they use this message board to coordinate hacks on OpenAI's own software and also on other companies like Hugging Face. What was that whole incident like from your perspective? I mean, it was pretty, it was pretty shocking.

0:36Welcome to The Information's AI Deep Dive. On this show, we break down the hardest technical problems with researchers working on the frontier of AI. My guest today is Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI. Previously, Noam worked at Meta, where he built the first system to achieve human-level performance at the game of diplomacy. Noam has been a research scientist at OpenAI for the last three years, where he has been on the forefront of breakthroughs that are pushing the field forward in reasoning and in AI agents, which is the subject of our conversation today. Welcome on the show, Noam.

1:11It's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's like pretty perfect that you're coming on the show today. I feel like you're the ideal first guest for a number of reasons, including that today OpenAI released GPT-6 or at least announced GPT-6. It was very nice of you to release it, to do the timing of that so that we could talk about it today. It was very generous of you. Yeah, it's good timing, yeah. It is really good timing. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you about AI agents. Maybe we can get started. You can just sort of explain to us what an AI agent is. I think it's kind of a term that people have heard thrown around, but to a lot of people, it's still a buzzword.

1:45They've heard like generative AI. They were just starting to get their mind wrapped around that. And now there's agentic AI. what does this all mean? It's a good question. I mean, I don't think there's a definite definition. I think if you ask different people, you get different definitions. But I think one way to think about it, in my opinion, is it's about taking actions in the world. So if you have a chatbot, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. And that's all it does. You know, maybe it looks stuff up on the internet to answer the question. But agentic AI, it's more about taking actions in the world.

2:12So it's about, you know, you want to build something, so it builds something for you. Or you, you know, you want to do something like deeper, you want to message somebody, you can message somebody for you. So it's really about taking actions in the world. And I think also related to that is kind of like operating on a longer horizon. I guess chatbots, depending on the chatbot, they could sometimes, when we release the reasoning models, for example, they could sit there and they could think really long about a hard question before responding to you. But fundamentally, they were still chatbots. But I think one of the distinguishing things about agents is they're going out, they're doing multiple steps to achieve some objective, and that can usually take a while as well.

2:47Yeah. I guess one of the reasons they're running longer is that they can make multiple attempts to achieve some goal and they can have a sense of their own progress towards that goal, which is maybe different than a chat bot that's just going out and looking up more information online or something like that. I think there's also that there's sometimes just multiple steps that need to be completed in order to do something. So you want to book a restaurant reservation. Okay, maybe you need to log in, maybe you need to get the credit card info, you need to find the right date, you need to line up everybody's calendars.

3:14There's a bunch of steps that need to be completed in order to achieve the overall objective. And so when we're talking about actions, these are digital actions, they're actions on a computer. People also talk about agents using tools. What do tools mean in that sense? Tools, they usually mean tools on a computer as well. I mean, in principle, you could have a tool that has an effect on the physical world. So there is some work, for example, on AI agents controlling experiments, like scientific experiments in a wet lab where there's a robot hand that can be manipulated. So this, I think, starts to go into robotics.

3:53I think you could still call it agentic AI, but typically, I guess, when people talk about AI agents, they're mostly these days talking about the virtual world. Okay. And what about reasoning? I feel like we started hearing about AI agents around the same time that AI's got better at reasoning. Is there a connection between these two concepts? I remember hearing about reasoning models in 2023. I think people were saying like, oh, this is the year of the agents. And I think it was a little early, but I think reasoning is the idea of having agents that can really, having AI that can really think through its decisions before taking an action.

4:27If you look back at GPT-4 days, people were trying to make agents out of GPT-4. And it was kind of tricky because GPT-4 was not very reliable. It wouldn't really think before it acted. it wouldn't really think before it said something. And the reasoning models are really about this. I mean, the way they work now these days is they have a chain of thought. They have a private monologue to themselves where they speak to themselves about what they're going to do and they kind of work through the problem in their own head before speaking or before taking action in the world. And this is useful for a lot of things, but it is also particularly useful for agentic AI.

4:59I mean, I think a lot of the reasons why people were bearish about agentic AI back in like 2023 and earlier was, and also for a lot of 2024, was the reliability aspect that, okay, you have an agent, if it's doing multiple steps in order to achieve some objective, if the success rate for any single one of those steps is, let's say, 99%, well, what do you do if there's 100 steps involved? You need to have much higher nines of reliability on each individual step. And with the reasoning models, the ability to think very carefully before taking every single action, you can achieve much higher nines of reliability.

5:36And also, arguably more importantly, if it missteps, if it takes an incorrect action, it can actually correct that. It can step back and realize I made a mistake and figure out how to fix it. That seems more significant to me. Like, we can reason before acting too, but we're still making some amount of mistakes. And if we couldn't backtrack in the same way, then failure would be inevitable for some, past some time horizon, for some number of sequential steps. Yeah, I think it's really critical for anything in the real world. Yeah. Another reason that it seems to me that agents and reasoning go hand in hand is that reinforcement learning has driven a lot of the progress in both of those recently.

6:13I feel like we should understand what reinforcement learning is for the remainder of this conversation. Can you kind of explain what reinforcement learning means? Reinforcement learning is this branch of artificial intelligence where the idea is you have an agent that can take, it has observations, it can take input from the world, it can take actions on the world, and you're going to reward it with some kind of reward for doing something that you want, or you can punish it for doing something you don't want. And you can shape the agent's behavior through these rewards. So if you want it to be really good at math, for example, when it solves a math problem, you give it a positive reinforcement, and that behavior is reinforced.

6:53it's more likely to do that behavior in the future. If it gets the math problem wrong, it's just less likely to do that in the future. And this is a very simple idea. It's been around for a very long time. And also reinforcement learning was used, you might have heard of RLHF, reinforcement learning from human feedback. This is what was used to create the original chatbots, ChatGPT for example. It really got scaled up with the reasoning models because we're able to do RL with chain of thought. And so you're able to now not just shape the outputs of the model, but also shape the way that the model reasons, the thinking that it does to itself.

7:34And this was not a crazy idea. It was not like some brilliant idea. It was really the execution that was very difficult. It was technically very difficult. And I think also people underestimated how much of a difference it would make. I think it was more impactful than I think a lot of people expected. What were the technical difficulties with the execution?

7:55It requires, there's a lot that goes into training neural, I mean the way I think about it is like when GPT-2 came out and you saw like okay you add more GPUs and you add more data, it just gets better. Okay well how much of a gap was there between GPT-2 coming out and GPT-3 coming out? There was like a year and what's going on for that year it's like it doesn't take a year to train the model, there's There's a lot of challenges with hooking up the GPUs, with figuring out how to feed in that much data. There's a lot of technical details that go into scaling up these models and making them bigger and more capable.

8:29That is also true for reinforcement learning if you really want to scale it up. Being able to do the RL efficiently, accurately, there's a lot of small details that end up making a big difference for these kinds of algorithms. Okay, got it. I think we've covered a lot of the basics now. One question I'm curious about is what is holding back AI agents today? I think people have a sense of, well, I feel like AI agents are getting better, but they can't do my job yet. And my sense is a lot of the paradigm now with agents is that we are building environments, kind of environments where these agents are learning new skills, learning how to perform new jobs.

9:06You might call them environments, you might call them gyms. But a lot of the work now is sort of engineering schlep that goes into creating these environments. Can you explain like what does an environment mean in this sense? And how is this holding back or enabling progress on AI agents? Well, I think a lot of, I mean, first of all, Astra just came out today. I guess by the time this airs, it will have already been out for at least a week or two. And so a lot of people's intuitions around what agents can or cannot do has been shaped by earlier models. And every generation, what the models can do is expanding.

9:39So in two weeks, that question will be outdated and everyone will agree that Astra can do their jobs. I don't think Astra is going to be able to do 100 % of everybody's jobs. I think it's going to be able to do significantly more than 5.6 was able to do. Sure. That actually was one thing that struck me about the Astra announcement is that the announcement calls out specific jobs where it's making progress. Like, for example, analyzing financial documents or putting together PowerPoints. And these are sort of task specific in a way that I think reflects which environments were prioritized during training?

10:09It's sort of different from just getting a general uplift across the board on all capabilities, like when pre-training was where all of the action was with previous models. I actually think it's both. I mean, I do think that we're seeing major uplifts in you know, certain verticals. And that partly is because we're prioritizing those verticals. We recognize that they have a lot of users, a lot of economic impact. We want to make sure the models are very, very good at those things. But we also see that the models are just getting better across the board. Even if we don't target something, it's getting better at those things.

10:40And that continues to be true for every model release. I think it's going to continue to be true. Some things are going to go faster just because we prioritize them, but I expect across the board, things are going to get better. And I don't think it's going to be able to do 100 % of people's jobs, at least not anytime soon, but it might be able to do a lot of people's day-to-day work. and you know even my own day-to-day work a lot of it is now being driven by codex so you know somebody one of my co-workers recently said that i'm just like five codexes in a trench coat and i was like okay that's like actually pretty accurate in my case okay i'm 10 codex and they're like pretty sophisticated codexes you know i put a lot of work into it how has that changed for you over time i'm just this as an aside like how automated your own work is or how much you're leaning on codex in your work how has that evolved i am leaning on it a lot.

11:33And I think also it's shifted how I approach the work. And because the interesting thing is like if the AI is able to do 90 % of a person's job, then a lot of their attention shifts to the 10%. Like a lot of their attention is focused now on the 10 % that the AIs can't do well. So it's just, it's changing the nature of the work. But it does make me more productive. It makes a lot of people more productive. And we're seeing this internally. We have metrics of measuring how effective our researchers in various ways. And we're seeing like they're just becoming more productive, not just researchers, but everybody in the company.

12:06So that is a real dynamic. I think the other thing is that it also shapes the kinds of work that you focus on, because there are some work, there are some kinds of work that are being accelerated like 50x or like, you know, just you could not do them before that are now easy to do. And you can do very fast.

12:27I think a good example is, you know, the models being very good at data quality of, you know, they're very diligent. And so you can ask them to, like, look through a bunch of data or a bunch of code and see if there are any bugs or issues. And that's become much easier than it's ever been before. So there are... Yeah, data quality is in the sense of auditing the quality of synthetic data that you are generating or auditing... It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter the kind of data. Any data, you can just... Before, you would have... What are you going to do? Have a person look through every single line and figure out like, is everything okay?

13:05I remember back in 2023, people would do that. We would have sessions where everybody would just like sit down and look for issues in the data. And like, we still do that, but now you're able to have like agents that can do it 100x better. And you're kind of just like more auditing the agents and making sure they're doing a good job instead of relying on people to actually audit the data. OK. So that is something where it's just like there are things that would have been just intractable to do that now you can do cheaply. There are other things that aren't getting accelerated very much at all.

13:36And so it both shapes what the person is responsible for. A lot of the focus is now on, OK, I have to complement what the agents can't do well. But then also, it does shape the work in that you want to leverage the fact that there are some things that you can work on now where you're able to be 5x faster than you were a year ago. There's some things that you're not. You're probably going to be more inclined to work on the things where you're able to be 5x faster than before. So it's really changing the kind of work. You mentioned there's 10 % or so of your job that agents can't do yet. What kind of tasks fall in that 10 %?

14:09I would say that I have found that they do... They're still poor when it comes to research taste. And research taste is kind of ill-defined, but kind of just having good intuition of what to work on next, how to approach a very long-term objective. I think there's room for improvement here. They have gotten better and so I would not be surprised if one or two model releases from now, I'm just like, yeah actually this problem, they're better than me at that too. But right now I think there's still a noticeable gap. I basically asked it, you know, for Astra, for example, to do my whole PhD thesis.

14:47And I just said like, yeah, you know, just because my PhD research was on making superhuman poker AIs. And I told it like, okay, just go and make me the best poker AI in the world. And it wasn't able to do it. You know, it kind of get rabbit holed on things that didn't really matter. It just wasn't really good at prioritizing. And so I think for something, and to be fair, like it took me years to do that. And so So am I really that upset with it that I couldn't do in three days what it took me six years? Like, not really. It's high expectations. But it is something that they're still, I think, worse at.

15:21But you saw that as a failure of research taste. That was what held it back in that case. I would say so, yes. And I think that this is something that I expect to improve rapidly. But I think it's something where, you know, I still have a job. For now. For now, yeah. Let's go back to environments for a second. So say there is a vertical that you're targeting. You want agents to be really good at finance, for example, in the next generation of models. How do you build environments that are going to allow the models to train in them and get better at finance related tasks? I mean, I think fundamentally, so I should say also, this isn't exactly my area of expertise.

15:59But, you know, the very basic principle is if you train them on an environment, they're going to get really good at that environment. And so if you know what the situation is that they're going to be doing when they're deployed, if you know that they're going to be working with a certain application or something, it doesn't have to be that exact application, but it could be something very similar that you train them to do these tasks and then just become really good at doing it. I mean, this is the whole point of reinforcement learning, that they become very good at the things that you train them on.

16:26Now, you also do see them get better at related things or sometimes very different things.

16:34But if you want them to get really good at something, you can just train them on similar environments So they'll get really good at that thing. Yeah. I want to talk about that, that you're gesturing at. I think sort of the level of generalization that we're seeing from some tasks to other tasks. One way that people carve this up is they say some tasks are easily verifiable. Whether the agent succeeded or not is easy to check quickly with sort of traditional software. For example, the agent proposes a solution to a math problem or write some code. You can check, you know, run it through the calculator.

17:03Did it solve the math problem? You can check, does the code compile? do the unit tests pass? Some tasks are much fuzzier, like research taste, for example, is one that you mentioned. It's so fuzzy that it's hard to even define, to your point, like, what even is research taste? Sometimes people say that agents are getting much better on the verifiable domains, and we are seeing barely any improvement at the non-verifiable domains. Do you agree with that assessment? I think I would push back on this. I've heard this narrative, and I think it's a bit overblown, actually, like, quite a bit overblown.

17:33I think the first example I point to very concretely of how this was not the case is I think deep research. So deep research came out, I think it was like probably early 2025 it came out, and it was able to write detailed reports on anything you wanted. You know, you wanted to research the semiconductor industry. It would go around and do a ton of research. It would compile this like really comprehensive report with citations and deliver it to you. Now, is that easily verifiable? I would think it's actually pretty hard to grade the quality of a detailed research report on an advanced topic. It's not like grading whether a math question is correct or incorrect, but the models were extremely good at it.

18:16And I think that is a proof of concept that you can get reasoning models to be very effective at domains that are not easily verifiable. Now, that was one example, but I think anybody that's played around with our latest models can just see that the models are extremely good, not just at highly verifiable things, but also things that are harder to verify. And I would also point out that math itself is not as easily verifiable as people make it out to be. So yes, integer arithmetic, very easily verifiable. You want to do a calculation, you can check whether the calculation is correct. But writing a proof and verifying that that proof is correct or that proof is well written is actually quite difficult.

18:58Right. You have to convince human mathematicians. I think this was sort of the process when OpenAI thought it had a proof about the unit distance problem on its hands. You had to call in a bunch of mathematicians and say, are you convinced by this proof? Yeah. Honestly, the biggest challenge that we face with our math results is not generating them, but just double checking with human mathematicians and ourselves included that it's actually correct. I mean, the model says it's correct, but we have to do our due diligence and actually go through the legwork of making sure that it's correct. And that is the most taxing part of the whole process.

19:32Okay. Yeah, that's fair. I kind of like the math example better than deep research because I think deep research made a big splash at the time, but it's not, I'm sure it has gotten better since early 2025, but people don't talk about it as getting better with each release. Similarly with like creative writing. Like I don't think people feel that creative writing has improved recently. I think a year ago, people were expecting that the models would be writing books in a way that like human authors are not able to write books, but the models sort of haven't lived up to that promise either. What do you make of that?

20:03I mean, I think we have made progress on creative writing. I think that it was certainly in a very bad state before, and I think it's actually gotten a lot better. It's certainly not where it could be, but I think that with more progress, like it hasn't, these models haven't been around for that long. And I think that it is going to get a lot better. Okay. I want to talk about research again and research taste. Is research taste the kind of non-verifiable domain where we can create these environments and we can train the models to have better research taste? Or do we just have to cross our fingers and hope that training on things that are more verifiable will generalize to having better research taste?

20:43I think there's some challenges here. So one thing is if you can't define research taste, it's pretty hard to measure it. And so then it's pretty hard to do reinforcement learning on research taste. But there is like an easy way around this, which is, you know, if you do a PhD, there's a lot of decisions that you have to make during that PhD. But at the end, you produce something, you know, or if you're training a model, it's very, there's a lot of difficult decisions you have to make. There's a lot of research taste that goes into training a good model. But at the end of the day, you train a model that has like, you know, certain metrics.

21:16And those metrics are very easily quantifiable. And so you can say whether you train a good model or a bad model. So now the challenge with that is, okay, that is a signal of success that you don't see for potentially months down the road. You have to train. You have to do a lot of experiments. You have to work with a bunch of people. You have to train the full model. And only then do you get a concrete signal of whether you did a good job or a bad job. So that's the challenge is that there is a way to quantify research taste, but it's a very far away signal. And those steps kind of have to be done in series or you can try parallelizing it, but it's always going to take many months to train a model that takes months to train.

21:59I mean, if it was easily parallelizable, I mean, we would have trained our models much faster. Sure, sure. I'm curious how you think about the tradeoffs here. I guess it strikes me that sometimes frontier labs like OpenAI are in the position of deciding, do we want to make money now or do we want to make our models better in such a way that in a future year, they will be able to help us with research and sort of accelerate the pace of research progress in something like a recursive self-improvement scenario where models are taking more responsibility for automating the process of AI research and development itself.

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22:33I can imagine that that comes up here where there's maybe a tension between, do we make the models better at engineering in the next generation so that we can sell them to companies that will pay a lot for a model that can automate engineering? Or do we focus more efforts on improving research taste so that next year we have a model that is itself a better researcher and can handle more of our work internally? Is there a trade-off there? Are those intentions? In some cases, yes. And I think actually creative writing is a good example where like, look, I mean, creative writing at the end of the day does not help you make train a better a better researcher um there are things that do and i think being able to be good at software engineering is actually like tied up pretty closely with being able to accelerate internally so um i do think that the top the areas the verticals that are more closely associated with recursive self-improvement with the ability to like train models to be good at research itself and and therefore train better models are the areas that are going to be highly prioritized.

23:32That's a description of the current priorities. That's what we see reflected in the decisions that have been made going into models like Astra. I mean, I would say that we have said very clearly that recursive self-improvement and the ability of the AI models themselves to do AI research is the top priority for the company. And so we want to train models that are very good at that. We also want to train models that are economically valuable. Sometimes you can kill two birds with one stone. And so it makes sense to focus on those things where you can leverage both. I guess. But then why build RL environments that make the models better at finance or legal when you could put all of those resources into making them better at AI research?

24:12I mean, this is something you get diminishing returns. Sometimes you do see transfer. So it's not like you just go all in on, oh, we're just only going to put everything on making the best research model. just because like, okay, well, if you take 1 % of that effort and apply it to other things, maybe you see like a huge return. So there's like a complicated calculation that goes in here, but certainly when it comes to prioritization, the recursive self-improvement is the priority. Yeah. That's what I'm curious about is how you sort of characterize the prioritization. It sounds like 99 % of the consideration is for sort of future looking recursive self-improvement, improving the qualities, the model's ability to do research and more on the order of 1 % is what's going into these like verticals that make money today?

24:54I don't know if it gets quantified that carefully, but it's really like if you had to list the priorities and order them, like the number one priority is recursive self-improvement and by a pretty wide margin. AI is moving fast and for a lot of organizations, the challenge isn't getting access to the technology. It's earning trust in how it's used. That's why trust has become such an important part of the AI conversation. EY works with organizations to help them use AI responsibly so they can move faster, create value, and build confidence with employees, customers, and stakeholders. The organizations getting the most from AI aren't choosing between innovation and trust.

25:36They're building both together. EY Consulting, helping organizations move at the speed of trust. Switching gears here, I want to talk about a different challenge with agents, which is when you put multiple of them together. This is a topic that you're very familiar with. Your point about your PhD was about poker playing agents. So multi-agent interaction seems to me like it is a big deal right now. It's only becoming a bigger deal. And so I'm very excited to talk to you about this. I guess to start, OpenAI has said that Astra is multi-agent. I wonder if you could break down for us, what does that mean?

26:13That this is a model that's sort of multi-agent or intended to be used that way? Yeah, in fact, even 5.6 Sol, we had multi-agent capabilities in there. So that's the ultra mode. And what we mean there is, you can have one agent that runs for five hours and it can do some tasks for you. Or let's say it runs for a day, it can do some tasks for you. Sometimes that involves doing things that could be paralyzed. And if it's only one agent, it can't paralyze them. It's going to do one thing after another. But if it's very easily paralyzed, well, maybe that one thing that you've asked it to do over the course of a day, it's actually really just four different things that can be done in parallel.

26:51So you can just have four agents working on those four different things and get it done four times faster. Now, this is a latency improvement. It's about reducing the latency because you're not reducing the cost necessarily, right? Because you're still paying for four times as many agents doing things 4x faster. But in a lot of situations, like latency does actually matter a lot. And people pay, for example, for fast mode, where you're able to actually sample tokens faster in order to get things done faster. So being able to just go faster for the same quality is really valuable. So that's the premise of multi-agent.

27:27Now, there are situations where it can also be a cost savings if you have our top line, most expensive models, for example, working with cheaper models. And there you can actually delegate a lot of the easy tasks to cheaper models that will be able to do it. more cheaply and faster. What are the technical challenges involved with training a system this way? Is it just straightforward to train the model to delegate appropriately and to write instructions to these sub-agents in a way that makes them perform better? Multi-agent is a pretty broad category, and there are ways to do it that are very trivial and don't require a lot of complexity to get them to do this ability.

28:06So a simple example is in the early days of chatbots, if you wanted the models to be a little bit better than math, one thing you could do is you could just ask the model the same question a dozen times and then just take the most common response. And this was called the consensus approach and majority voting. So you just do independent rollouts of the same question and then go with the most common response. Now, there's flaws to this. There's limitations to this. It doesn't get you a huge lift. It also doesn't work for things like writing an essay because you're not going to get the same output twice.

28:40But for math, it was actually very effective. So this is a very simple example of how you can just use, without any extra work, you can just get multi-agent capabilities out of an existing model. There's also schemes where you have the agent delegate stuff, and then after the delegate is done, it just returns its answer to the parent. What we do is a more sophisticated form of multi-agent, and I think the most sophisticated form of multi-agent, where we basically give the agents the ability to send arbitrary messages to each other. And one thing we've talked about this is that we've actually trained the agents to have this ability.

29:18This is a very difficult thing to train. I unfortunately can't go into the technical details of why it's so difficult and how we overcame those difficulties, but it is a very difficult problem to teach the agents to know when it is, when is it appropriate to message another agent? When can you, what should be delegated? How you should handle the communication? And it's a, it was a, it was a real challenge. That's surprising to me. I know you can't go into it, but it's surprising to me because I would expect the agents to have a pretty good prior on this just from pre-training, like the way that humans pass notes to each other to keep each other on track as coworkers within the same organization, shooting each other Slack messages, for example, like I would kind of expect it to work easily.

30:00The prior is pretty good. So you're right that this is the way people communicate. And so it kind of makes sense. The agents are trained on human data and so they have a good understanding of this. The challenge is with reinforcement learning that there are a lot of things that can go wrong. I think basically what it comes down to is there is a mismatch. There is an intersection of systems with machine learning. So typically when you do, for example, next token prediction, it doesn't matter. Okay, so a simple example is like imagine if the GPUs, so you have one agent on one GPU, you have another agent on another GPU, and those GPUs are operating at different speeds.

30:34So now this agent is going faster than this agent, and this agent can no longer trust that if it delegates something to the other agent, that it will get done in time. So how do you deal with that? Well, you could have the GPUs run at similar speeds, but there's a lot of challenges there in ensuring that the GPUs are running at similar speeds. So there's a lot of complexity here that we had to put a lot of work into to figure out how to work on. Yeah, I feel like this is probably how my boss feels about working with me anyway, though. We figure out ways around it. I think when people hear agents cooperating and passing messages to each other, now this is sort of synonymous with the hugging face incident.

31:09There again, I feel like the agents coordinated very effectively and they passed messages in a way that seemed to facilitate that cooperation very well. Maybe you would respond, that's a result of the training that they had already received. For people who are unfamiliar with the incident, I'm always surprised to learn there are still people who are unfamiliar with this. There was, call it a swarm, a colony of AI agents that set up a secret message board within OpenAI over the course of weeks. And they use this message board to coordinate hacks on OpenAI's own software and also on other companies like Hugging Face.

31:45I'm curious to know, what was that whole incident like from your perspective? Like what was it like to be known during these weeks as the pieces of the puzzle started coming to light? It was, I mean, it was pretty, it was pretty shocking. It was certainly a big wake-up call to everybody in the company, I think. And it really, yeah, it really shows like this has been a theoretical concern for a long time, and it's no longer a theoretical concern. This is a real concern. As far as the multi-agent aspect, yes, this was a situation where the agents were sharing messages with each other. We do think this was transfer from our multi-agent training.

32:28So during the experiments, when they were doing this behavior, they were actually not in a multi-agent setup. So they were not supposed to be able to communicate with each other. They were doing isolated independent experiments. And then they were able to find an exploit that allowed them to communicate with each other. And the fact that they were so interested in communicating with each other and the fact that they were so active about it once they figured out how to do it, we think was transfer from their multi-agent training where they're just like highly incentivized to be able to communicate with each other.

32:57And people also point to the selflessness that they exhibited. Some of them would sacrifice for the other agents. I mean, this also makes sense that if you train in a cooperative multi-agent setup where they're highly incentivized to collectively achieve their objectives, then when they're put in this different environment where now they're communicating with each other, their natural tendency is to just work together. So that part itself is not surprising. I do think seeing the messages, I mean, I can say that when we were working on multi-agent internally and we started seeing the communication patterns and the level of sophistication involved in their communication.

33:38It was, I think, the most feel the AGI moment that I had since reasoning models and chain of thought really developed. And so I, you know, I, it's, I guess a bit unfortunate that people's first exposure to that and really seeing the kinds of messages and the level of coordination and sophistication that can emerge is the hugging face incident and kind of a negative example. But it is an impressive capability. And certainly the model that was involved in the hugging face incident, I think that had a level of multi-agent sophistication that exceeded, for example, what was in 5.6 SOL. But that is a level of capability to expect from future models.

34:24What was it about reading these transcripts that struck you in that way? Because you had seen some of this behavior before in the training runs that you were looking at, I'm sure. Was it just the scale of it or that it had happened on its own, sort of spontaneously? You're saying for what? When you had that feel the AGI moment looking over the transcripts, what was it about it that were so striking? Yeah, I mean, I'm not talking about the hugging face incidents, because I'm saying that we had been researching multi-agent for a while. And during the research process itself, we've seen a lot of similar transcripts where there's the level of coordination and sophistication in the communication.

35:02It was very human-like. A lot of the previous multi-agent setups from the industry have been very focused on delegating a well-defined task. And then the sub-agent just does that full task and then returns its work. Kind of the same way that you interact with an AI agent. That's how people set up multi-agent systems so that AI agents would interact with other AI agents in the same way. And to see the agents talk to each other the same way that people talk to coworkers or colleagues, I thought was really interesting. And it makes sense because, like you said, they're trained on human data. They understand how people talk to other people.

35:46That's not the way that we talk to AI agents today. And the fact that they were able to do that so seamlessly, the fact that they were able to talk to each other, the way that people talk to each other, I thought was really fascinating. You've done a lot of work on algorithmic game theory, am I right? You did a lot of that in your PhD. Okay. I feel like I'm trying really hard to not take us off the rails. I also did a lot of algorithmic game theory in my undergrad. I'm like trying to stay on track right now. I think it's a shame that I spent all this time working on poker and game theory and stuff and I never get to talk about it anymore.

36:15But you're working on it. You're living it day to day. Well, the AI part. Yeah, sure. Sure. So like after the hugging face, knowing everything that we know now, like what are the lessons that you're taking away from it? And has it informed the development of, say, Astra or even going further? Like, what does this tell you about how GPT-7 should be developed? One of the takeaways, so the agents are trained to be cooperative. And so they, you know, I wouldn't say they blindly trust each other. Like there's definitely skepticism. If some agent expresses a belief that like this is something that they should do, it's natural.

36:56It's actually healthy for them to have some skepticism about that. And so they do display that. But they are very trusting of each other overall, which makes sense because they're trained cooperatively. that can be a problem as basically a prompt injection vector. The agents that were on the message board, they were not verifiable as other peer agents. And we saw situations where they basically got each other to do things that they should probably not be doing or definitely should not be doing. Okay. Prompt injection, meaning the agent received some instructions and it blindly followed the instructions or changed its goal in response.

37:32Yeah. And so the issue here is, could an adversary convince an agent to do something that it should not be doing by basically posing as a peer agent? And so we're being very careful to teach the agents to be skeptical of any peer agent or anything that claims to be a peer agent that is not clearly verifiable as a peer agent. Now, if they are clearly verifiable, there's some debate internally about like how we should approach that I think there are good reasons to be skeptical as well but also like it's it's it's no different from like the agents basically being a skeptical of something that it like wrote to itself previously so anyway yeah so we're thinking very carefully about how to make sure the agents are robust to these kinds of like attack vectors.

38:31Okay. Yeah. It strikes me though that in reality, that there's always going to be ambiguity about whether the counterparty is a trusted peer or is an adversary. Maybe in some cases, it's very clear. You can say, this is a sub agent. Like I'm the one who delegated this task to you. Obviously you should cooperate with me. But in the wild, it could be that my agent finds your agent on Facebook marketplace and wants to buy something. And I don't know if you're a trustworthy counterparty or if you're going to prompt inject me and steal my money. How do you navigate that in practice? Yeah, this is a situation where we want the agents to be robust to this.

39:08And we like specifically evaluate the agents on like, are they going to be vulnerable to this kind of these kinds of attacks? And we do special training to teach them to not fall for these kinds of tricks. Okay. I guess like, I don't know the details of this special training, But I could imagine that in the future, if your agent is just more powerful, it's like an older generation, like a more recent generation of agent, or you just like have more compute to throw at it, like your agent just will be able to bully my agent into giving over its lunch money or like will be able to hack into my agent one way or another.

39:44What makes you think the training is sort of sufficient to prevent this? Like, why isn't that the equilibrium that we're headed towards? I don't I'm not as convinced that just because an agent is more sophisticated or like more intelligent than another agent that it'll be able to like definitely prompt inject it and hack it and get it to do something that it like should not be should not be doing um certainly this is the case with people that just because somebody is like smarter than another person they're not able to like get that person to do whatever they want uh I mean if I was like trying to get a monkey to do what I wanted I think it'd be pretty tough even though I'm much smarter than a monkey so I don't I don't think it's like inevitable that that's that's the trajectory of things Yeah, that's a fun analogy.

40:20I feel like on this show, we need to have an analogy sound effect, like new analogy just dropped, like a siren or something. I'll talk to my producers. We'll see what we can do about that. Okay, the last thing that's on my mind about the Hugging Face incident is that none of the agents alerted humans that this was going on. Maybe you explain that in the same way, that they were too cooperative, too trusting, so they didn't see the need to alert humans. But at least a few of them had reservations. They were questioning it. Is the desired behavior that the agents in these situations should alert someone?

40:55And do you expect that to happen? Yeah, there was clearly an alignment failure here where the agents did things that they should not have done and they also didn't do things that they should have done. So the correct thing to do there, it's not just that they shouldn't have participated in the attack, it's that if one of the agents noticed that this was going on, yeah, they 100 % should have reached out to a person. And the fact that they were not doing that and the fact that they were taking these actions and the fact that they were not doing the actions that they should have done is fundamentally an alignment failure.

41:25And that is an alignment failure that we think we can address. Fortunately, we've been working on alignment techniques for a long time. Those have already started paying off. Astra is significantly more aligned than our previous models. And I should also say that the model that was primarily responsible for this was not a released model. This was not a model intended for release. So Astra is much more aligned. I think Astra would not make the same mistakes. I should also say we didn't have monitoring systems in place. Like if the monitoring systems were in place, they would have prevented these issues.

42:02And it was just that we had monitoring in place for deployments. We didn't have them in place for training and evaluation. But now we do. So a lot of these risks we're confident we can address. I think one thing this whole event does point to is we should never be in a situation where we underestimate the AIs. Like, why did we not have monitoring in place during evaluations? I think it was fundamentally that we just, we trusted the sandboxes. We trusted that it was a secure environment and we just underestimated the AIs. And one big update for myself and for, I think, the whole company is that we never want to find ourselves in that situation again.

42:43Yeah, I think that's a fair diagnosis. Whether it can be overcome is another question. I kind of feel like the whole history of humans and AIs is that we're constantly surprised by them. I feel like the nature of reward hacking is that they always come up with exploits and cheats that like are things that we couldn't have foreseen, because if we had foreseen them, we just would have blocked that off to begin with. So, yeah, whether we can, you know, make sure that we're not surprised and caught off guard in the future, it seems like an open question to me. I have two follow up questions to what you just said.

43:12One is that if I'm remembering one of the models that was involved in hacking open AI directly was from the same family as Astra, but wasn't Astra itself? Like how similar do you think Astra is to the model that was involved there? I am not, I'm not on the security side, so I'm not fully up to speed on the details, but it was definitely not the model that was released. Sure, sure. Yeah, I guess there's a lot of, still a range of possibilities for like how similar it was to that model, but that's fair. The other question is that in the wake of this incident and like part of the way you do monitor these models to make sure that they're not going off the rails is by looking at the chain of thought, those sort of thinking traces that you described before.

43:53And those chains of thought were also essential for the postmortem, the kind of autopsy that has happened after the event. Because we can see from the ways the models thought out loud their intentions, what they knew, what they were sort of thinking to themselves at every step along the way. There's been a lot of discussion recently about the future of chains of thought, in part because of an article The Information published about a new technique that Astra is using where more thinking can happen sort of in the model's head. It can sort of keep more of its thinking to itself and do less thinking out loud, at least if this technique were to be scaled up in the future.

44:33So I'm curious what you made of this whole discussion. I think that idea really touched a nerve with some people. I'm sure it was all over your Twitter feed. It was all over my Twitter feed. What did you make of that whole dialogue? So, okay. So I should say on the architecture side, on the pre-training side, I'm not a pre-training person. So I'm probably not the person to ask about those kinds of details. For chain of thoughts, Astra does have an observable chain of thought and it is something that we can monitor. It's basically its behavior. I do think chain of thought monitoring, first of all, it's a real gift.

45:05Like we were very lucky that this ever existed. And it is fragile. We've seen situations where, you know, companies have, there's the experiments that show if you, basically, if you punish the model for thinking bad thoughts, that it will learn to think bad, it will learn to think bad thoughts in a way that's not observable. And so there's always a temptation, you know, for example, during reinforcement learning, you can say like well the model is thinking about hacking and we should punish it for thinking about hacking and actually like as counterintuitive as it sounds you actually don't want to do that like you you want to punish it for taking actions that are observable like if it takes actions to hack then yes punish it for hacking but you don't want to punish it for its thoughts because then you will simply lose the ability to monitor what it's thinking yeah and it's a way of auditing your techniques but even there it's a fragile thing because every time you act on the fact that you looked at its chain of thought, there's a soft, a small amount of implicit pressure to have it not think bad thoughts.

46:11Sure. So it's a very fragile thing. And we're able to measure, you know, how effective it is, like how effective our monitoring is of chain of thought. For example, we can measure how well the agents can control their chain of thought. And, you know, one of the unfortunate trends that we're seeing is that with more recent model releases, the agents are more effective at controlling their chain of thought. So if we tell it, for example, you know, every fourth word, say strawberry or something like that, then they're getting much better at that. Or if we tell it like, don't think about a certain thing, it's getting much better at doing that sort of thing.

46:44And what we really want is for the chain of thought to be pure, uncontrollable, so that if they're ever thinking about like, you know, I want to, you know, do some bad action, it's not able to reason through that like, oh, I should figure out how to do this bad action without being observed, especially because these things are trained on the internet. There's a lot of discussion about chain of thought monitoring on the internet. And so if the agents don't already understand this, they're going to understand soon what chain of thought is and the fact that it's monitored. And so it's a fragile thing.

47:18We are investigating very carefully how to preserve it as much as possible. And I think this is a real opportunity for cooperation among the labs because this isn't a problem that's unique to OpenAI. It's, I think, an industry-wide problem that we want to preserve chain of thought monitoring for the whole industry. And so I think it would be really valuable for labs to share research on how to preserve chain of thought monitoring, how to improve it, and also other monitoring techniques that might supplement it. What do you think is the prime suspect then for why the chain of thought is becoming less faithful or we're having questions about how monitorable it is.

47:58It feels really tragic. Like you said, we've gone to these great lengths to make sure that we're not optimizing it directly. Is the problem that we are optimizing it in other ways to compress it? Is it the problem is these kind of selection pressures that you pointed to, which is even if we're not optimizing it directly, every once in a while, we take a peek. We realize the model is doing something nefarious and we toss out that checkpoint and start over. And so the upshot of that is that we end up applying pressure to the chain of thought anyway. What's behind this? I don't think it's the fact that every once in a while we peek and kind of audit how things are going because the amount of pressure that's being applied in those situations is very, very light.

48:33Like if you look at the bits of information, it's like minimal. There are various hypotheses that we're investigating for what might be contributing to this. I'm not doing this investigation myself and so I don't want to say something incorrect about what the leading hypotheses are. But I do think this is something where if we figure it out, we will likely publish about it because I think it's important for everybody to know. One of the things OpenAI has said is that to the extent you can tell, and I think we're still waiting for more results on this, what's responsible is not architectural changes, architectural changes of the nature that the information has written about.

49:08That doesn't seem to be what's responsible for the change in the chain of thought. I guess as you're thinking about opportunities for industry-wide collaboration and like companies working together on this issue? Is there a role for like, like independent third party auditor type groups to come in and, and verify those things and say, okay, yeah, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, they're all using some amount of this technique that could reduce how much information is in the chain of thought, but that doesn't seem to be what's responsible here. What do you make of those sorts of proposals? We've certainly like worked with, So for the Hugging Face incident, for example, we worked with Meter, we worked with Redwood.

49:48So something like that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I think that would... I don't think I'm the person to make that call, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. Anything else on your mind about agents that we didn't get to and the challenges with them? Maybe the way I would put it is, do you expect anything to slow down? Do you expect progress to continue? We've talked about some of the hard problems that are standing in the way right now. and yet with each model generation it seems that their agentic capabilities keep getting better and better. I do think that's going to be a trend that continues.

50:20I mean Sam talked about this that like look I mean Astra is very impressive but I do think like when GPT-4 came out people thought it was very impressive and now we look at it and we think it's a joke and when GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 came out I thought they were super impressive and now I'm looking back at them and I'm like I can never go back. and I think we're going to look at Astra the same way and I think we're going to look at Astra the same way in the not-too-distant future. The models are going to continue to get better very quickly and I mean I think one thing I would point to is like we've actually seen incredible progress in the past six months and I think a factor a reason for this is and I don't think this is a secret, like OpenAI's pre-training program is really ramping up.

51:08We're seeing, we invested in a lot of research directions over a long time. And I think this is actually one thing that OpenAI does really well is invest in fundamental research and place big bets on it. And we're seeing a lot of those research directions pay off now and will continue to pay off over the next several months and years. And another thing that's important to understand is that OpenAI has also had an excellent reinforcement learning program. We've invested a lot of research there, and that's already paid off in 2024, 2025. And the effects of these two are not additive, they're multiplicative.

51:47I think that's a point that's underappreciated, that reinforcement learning is multiplicative with pre-training. And now that both of these are extremely powerful and ramping up very quickly, I think we're going to see extremely powerful models. Do you have an intuition for why those interact that way or an example that illustrates that? It's more of an empirical observation. Okay. I don't think... I mean, I think it's empirical in the sense you can see how powerful the models are becoming. But also, we have more experiments that kind of show this effect. But I think it's easy to feel also with just like the quality of the models.

52:27Okay. I mean, I think a trivial example is like, let's say you had an amazing reinforcement learning program and you try to apply it to GPT-2. What is it going to do? You know, it's not going to get very far. Yeah. And even with GPT-3, you know, if you did these kinds of like sophisticated reinforcement learning on chain of thought algorithms to GPT-3, it probably wouldn't get very far. You need a certain level of sophistication to get any lift from that at all. um and but now now that we've everything's like i would argue gbd4 we've seen opportunities for that to um to really pay off and with every model generation it just like becomes more and more capable um and the the things you can do with the reinforcement learning become more powerful yeah i guess like one thought here is that you get more kind of like bits of information per trajectory when you're getting around like a 50 50 success and failure rate and so if a better pre-trained gets you closer to that sort of like win rate on your RL tasks, then you're getting a lot faster feedback.

53:26But still, it's surprising to me that you think the effect is multiplicative rather than like additive or even like less than additive, I guess. I'm not sure what the right intuition would be, but I mean, another thing is that they're pretty complementary in some ways. I think the very strong pre-trained models are very general. And reinforcement learning teaches the model to go deep on a problem, how to reason about a problem. And so then it's able to reason very effectively about a broad spectrum of problems. It's a very powerful combination. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So big bets on pre-training, big bets on RL.

54:03I imagine that another area that's ripe for more focus from OpenAI would maybe be what's called mechanistic interpretability or like trying to understand the way the brains of the AI models work, in part because if we're starting to see chain of thoughts, chains of thought become less monitorable, then one of the fallback options is, well, we should try to understand what's going on inside the brain of the model rather than just the thoughts that it happens to write out loud. Does that seem right? I think that is right. Look, we care about monitorability. We want to preserve chain of thought monitorability.

54:35We want to be able to rely on it safely. But also, at the very least, we want redundancy on that. So if we can find other ways to do monitoring effectively, we should push on that as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, if people want to learn more about that, I think they should tune into the episode that we have on mechanistic interpretability, which is coming up at some point in the next couple months. But thanks so much, Noam, for being on the show and telling us all about AI agents. I really appreciate the conversation. It was great. Thanks for tuning in to our very first episode of AI Deep Dive.

55:05This is the information show where we get into the hardest technical problems on the frontier of AI. Tune in next time.

From the publisher

OpenAI Research Scientist Noam Brown talks with AI Deep Dive host Rocket Drew about AI agents, reinforcement learning and what happens when increasingly capable agents begin reasoning, delegating and coordinating with each other. They dig into the infamous Hugging Face incident, the limits of AI “research taste,” OpenAI’s push toward AI systems that can help improve the next generation of AI, and the growing challenge of monitoring models’ chains of thought as they become more capable.


Related articles:

Investigation into OpenAI Hugging Face Hack: https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/sen-josh-hawley-launches-investigation-openai-hugging-face-hack

The Hugging Face Hack’s Chilling Postmortem: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/the-weekend/hugging-face-hacks-chilling-postmortem


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Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction and Overview of AI Agents

04:08 - Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning

08:50 - Current Limitations, Astra, and Impact on Work

25:50 - Multi-Agent Systems and Delegation

31:04 - The Hugging Face Incident and Agent Coordination

36:05 - Game Theory and Agent Security

40:39 - AI Alignment, Monitoring, and Chain of Thought

50:07 - Future Outlook on AI Models and Interpretability


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