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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.

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“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.”

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