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Nair: OpenAI already possessed a superior model during the DeepSeek release

Ashvin Nair · [State of RL/Reasoning] IMO/IOI Gold, OpenAI o3/GPT-5, and Cursor Composer — Ashvin Nair, Cursor · Dec 30, 2025 · at 31:21

Former OpenAI reasoning researcher Ashvin Nair discusses whether the release of DeepSeek's reasoning models disrupted OpenAI's internal roadmap.

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“The feeling in OpenAI is that like, well, I think we had a better model already at the time, right?”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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