McGrath: AI Frontier Is Bottlenecked by Shortage of Hybrid Systems-ML Talent
Josh McGrath · [State of Post-Training] From GPT-4.1 to 5.1: RLVR, Agent & Token Efficiency — Josh McGrath, OpenAI · Dec 31, 2025 · at 21:36
Josh McGrath, an OpenAI post-training researcher, discusses talent bottlenecks and frontier AI research skills with the Latent Space podcast hosts.
“I think we're still having trouble not at OpenAI, but I think as a whole, producing lots of people that do lot, want to do lots of both systems work and ML work. And I think if you're trying to push the frontier, you don't know which Place is currently bottlenecking the frontier, and it changes all the time. I mean, even within one project, it might change multiple times where the current bottleneck is. But I think the education system we have right now isn't really optimized for that.”
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 →