Nair: Fundamental science is less fruitful than empirical work for AI progress
Ashvin Nair · [State of RL/Reasoning] IMO/IOI Gold, OpenAI o3/GPT-5, and Cursor Composer — Ashvin Nair, Cursor · Dec 30, 2025 · at 43:16
Ashvin Nair (Cursor, ex-OpenAI) explains the trade-off between studying foundational scientific questions in AI and pursuing empirical engineering improvements.
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“There's like actually so many of these kind of more scientific questions that I would like love to explore sometime, but then it really kind of conflicts with like empirical stuff, you know, like unfortunately at any given moment in time, it doesn't seem like the most fruit for like, you know, improving something in the, especially in the short run, but even in the next couple of years is like, Understanding some of these questions.”
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