A glimpse into OpenAI’s largest ambitions

OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it’s a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is to serve as a research lab that will not only create “artificial general intelligence” but ensure that it benefits all of humanity. 

My colleague Will Douglas Heaven recently sat down for an exclusive conversation with the two figures at OpenAI most responsible for pursuing the latter ambitions: chief research officer Mark Chen and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. If you haven’t already, you must read his piece.

It provides a rare glimpse into how the company thinks beyond marginal improvements to chatbots and contemplates the biggest unknowns in AI: whether it could someday reason like a human, whether it should, and how tech companies conceptualize the societal implications. 

The whole story is worth reading for all it reveals—about how OpenAI thinks about the safety of its products, what AGI actually means, and more—but here’s one thing that stood out to me. 

As Will points out, there were two recent wins for OpenAI in its efforts to build AI that outcompetes humans. Its models took second place at a top-level coding competition and—alongside those from Google DeepMind—achieved gold-medal-level results in the 2025 International Math Olympiad.

People who believe that AI doesn’t pose genuine competition to human-level intelligence might actually take some comfort in that. AI is good at the mathematical and analytical, which are on full display in olympiads and coding competitions. That doesn’t mean it’s any good at grappling with the messiness of human emotions, making hard decisions, or creating art that resonates with anyone. 

But that distinction—between machine-like reasoning and the ability to think creatively—is not one OpenAI’s heads of research are inclined to make. 

“We’re talking about programming and math here,” said Pachocki. “But it’s really about creativity, coming up with novel ideas, connecting ideas from different places.”

That’s why, the researchers say, these testing grounds for AI will produce models that have an increasing ability to reason like a person, one of the most important goals OpenAI is working toward. Reasoning models break problems down into more discrete steps, but even the best have limited ability to chain pieces of information together and approach problems logically. 

OpenAI is throwing a massive amount of money and talent at that problem not because its researchers think it will result in higher scores at math contests, but because they believe it will allow their AI models to come closer to human intelligence. 

As Will recalls in the piece, he said he thought maybe it’s fine for AI to excel at math and coding, but the idea of having an AI acquire people skills and replace politicians is perhaps not. Chen pulled a face and looked up at the ceiling: “Why not?”

Read the full story from Will Douglas Heaven.

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