OpenAI doesn’t have a legitimate AI researcher? Here’s what that actually means
OpenAI doesn’t have an AI researcher? Sam Altman and his team announced that the company will have a “legitimate AI researcher” by 2028, but what does that mean?
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OpenAI doesn’t have an AI researcher? Sam Altman and his team announced that the company will have a “legitimate AI researcher” by 2028, but what does that mean?
You’d think that one of the world’s leading AI companies would have its own internal AI researcher on board.
What do you mean the company that created the world’s most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, doesn’t have an actual AI researcher?
Well, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Of course, OpenAI has human AI researchers, but the type of AI researcher that OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, and Sam Altman have in mind is a bit more autonomous.
On a livestream, Altman and Pachocki revealed that OpenAI is advancing its models so much that they anticipate having an entry-level research assistant by 2026 and a fully autonomous, legitimate AI researcher by 2028.
When OpenAI says it will have a legitimate AI researcher in-house by 2028, they mean a model “capable of autonomously delivering on larger research projects,” Pachocki said on the livestream.
The fabled “superintelligence” was also mentioned. Pachocki said that OpenAI believes that deep learning systems are roughly 10 years away from superintelligence, which means a system that outperforms humans across a range of operations.
While these goals are ambitious, OpenAI is working on continued algorithmic innovations as well as scaling its “test time compute,” Tech Crunch reports.
Test time computation is the amount of time models take to think about the problems they're trying to solve.
However, this will likely require a lot of resources, with Pachocki saying that whole data centers would be needed to solve a singular scientific breakthrough.
This livestream came on the heels of OpenAI’s announcement that the company is reorganizing.
Wait, is OpenAI a for-profit company now?
“OpenAI has completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure. The nonprofit remains in control of the for-profit and now has a direct path to major resources before AGI arrives, Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI board of directors, said in a statement.
In a post on X, Altman simplified the blog post, saying that the non-profit side of OpenAI, the OpenAI Foundation, is still in control.
Jakub and I are going to do a livestream and answer questions today at 10:30 am pacific.
undefined Sam Altman (@sama) October 28, 2025
We have a lot of things to talk about--of course we will cover our new corporate structure, but we will also discuss our new goals for research, the evolution of our product offerings, an…
However, in the blog post, Taylor said, “the more OpenAI succeeds as a company, the more the non-profit’s equity stake will be worth, which the non-profit will use to fund its philanthropic work.”
So, the success of the OpenAI Foundation is contingent on the success of the Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), OpenAI Group.
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