Jerry Tworek, VP of Research at OpenAI, reflects on why AI alignment cannot be solved once and for all.
Opinion
Tworek: GPT-5 can effectively be considered an iteration like 'o3.1'
“Like GPT-Five in some way I can be considered as like, oh, 3.1. It's a little bit of like, you know, iteration of like the same thing and the same concept”
Disclosure
Tworek: OpenAI team was initially underwhelmed by pre-trained GPT-4
“When we trained GPT-IV, we were pretty underwhelmed internally, and then there was a lot of moments, oh, we trained this small, we spent a lot of money on it, and it's kind of like, you know, pretty dumb, at least, like, you know, we have GPT-IV, GPT-III alrea…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tworek: Traditional human data labeling is becoming obsolete as models advance
“I think, like, in a way, I think it's getting more and more to be a thing of the past as the models are getting smarter and smarter. This is becoming less of a thing, but I think a few years back, and especially in GPT-IV days, this was the thing.”
Insight
Tworek: Calling LLMs strictly next-token predictors is inaccurate in RL era
“Language models do on their own, like fundamental level is they are often called as next token prediction machines. And that's not completely accurate in the age of reinforcement learning, but they still operate on mostly on tokens that are mostly text.”
Opinion
Tworek: OpenAI's o1 was mostly a tech demo for solving puzzles
“O-one like, to be perfectly honest, it was really mostly good at solving puzzles and like maybe a few kind of thinking problems here and there, but it wasn't like, it wasn't a very useful model. It was almost more like a technology demonstration.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tworek: Coding agents are the first successful agentic AI products
“Like, coding agents are at the moment the first, like, pretty successful agentic products built on top of AI.”