Yann Dubois, Post-Training Frontiers Co-Lead at OpenAI, explains how iteration cycles vary depending on how close a training stage is to product release.
Insight
Dubois: AI progress feels discontinuous because OpenAI crossed a reliability threshold
“Even though the, in my mind, everything, the progress is actually pretty continuous, you need to reach this level of reliability. To really make any of these AI tools very useful, and I think we just crossed that probably December last year, at least at OpenAI…”
Insight
Dubois: Test-time compute scaling exhibits logarithmic, diminishing returns
“We, we've seen again and again, the longer the model think for the better answers we will get. The problem is that this, these curves that we're talking about are not, are definitely not linear, and like they, there's some plateauing effect, and they kind of l…”
Insight
Dubois: Larger AI models achieve higher efficiency by thinking through weights
“If you have larger models the amount of thinking time, so the amount of tokens they will think for will usually decrease. And the way that you can think about it is that metaphorically, the model already thinks through its weights when it generates a certain t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dubois: AI frontier labs have successfully bypassed internet data walls
“There were a lot of conversation about hitting data walls, and it seems like we did not quite hit it. So the larger the model is, the more data it needs to ingest to be trained. And it seems like different companies kind of found different ways to overcome the…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dubois: Simulations will never fully eliminate the need for real-world AI training
“The problem is simulations are always going to be really hard and are not going to be truthful. So I think there will always need to be a certain, a little bit of training that will need to happen in the real world to make sure that the model realizes kind of …”
Insight
Dubois: RL becomes effective once base models possess strong world priors
“It seems that after crossing a certain scale of models that know basically everything about the world, and what we call, like, good priors about the world, It seems that reinforcement learning just started to work, and this is not only with LMS. Robotics seems…”