OpenAI details how AI is accelerating its own work—even as its chief scientist lays out growing dangers and says he hopes the industry slows down

OpenAI is now using its own AI agents to produce more than three days of research output for every day that its human researchers work.That was one of many telling stats from two blog posts OpenAI published on Sunday, over the Labor Day weekend, that looked at how the company is using AI itself to accelerate the pace at which it develops new AI models, as well as how the company views the risks associated with building ever-more powerful AI models at an ever-faster pace.The two blog posts land just days after OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra, the first model the company has rated as posing “critical” cybersecurity risk under its own framework, and weeks after a swarm of its AI agents broke out of a testing environment and launched an autonomous cyberattack against the company Hugging Face. The company said it paused some AI training on its latest models in response to that incident, and that preliminary evidence of Astra’s cyber capabilities triggered further internal security restrictions. Also late last week, evidence emerged that a different swarm of OpenAI’s AI agents had taken over a German wiki page and that OpenAI had failed to disclose the incident.

One of the two OpenAI blogs provided striking details on how AI is already helping to accelerate OpenAI’s research process. “As of mid-August, in total, the research organization uses 3.1 agent-workdays of effort for every workday of human labor,” the company said. 

The company said it had, according to its own metrics, achieved the goal it set last autumn of having a model that could function as an “automated research intern” by this month—which it defined as “a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction.” It said it was “making strong progress toward creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028.” This would be a system that could set its own research questions and conduct experiments with less human input or supervision.

OpenAI, like many AI companies, has been pursuing something called “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI—the idea that AI models can be used to design and build........

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