Fulford: RL breakthroughs in math and coding unlocked functional AI agents
Isa Fulford · GPT-5 and Agents Breakdown – w/ OpenAI Researchers Isa Fulford & Christina Kim · Aug 8, 2025 · at 13:37
Isa Fulford leads OpenAI's deep research and ChatGPT agent team on post-training. She explains how chain-of-thought reasoning from RL on STEM problems enables real-world agent capabilities.
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“When we saw the reinforcement learning algorithm working really well on math and physics problems and coding problems, It became pretty clear, like, just from reading through the chain of thought, like, okay, this thing's actually, like, thinking and reasoning and backtracking, and to build something that's able to, like, navigate the real world, it also needs to have that ability. So we realized, okay, like, this is a thing that's gonna actually let us get to useful agents.”
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