Altman: AI models like o3 can act as junior employees executing multi-hour tasks
Sam Altman · Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator · Jun 21, 2025 · at 19:29
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks with Y Combinator's Garry Tan about the transition of AI from basic search replacements to agentic systems that handle autonomous knowledge work.
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“But now you start to see things where you can like really give a task to Codex, for example or to deep research, and you have this thing go off and do a bunch of stuff and come back to you with like a proposal. It's like a very junior employee that can work on something for like a short period of time. And if you think about how much of the work that the world does is work that can be done in front of a computer in like few hour chunks where you then have someone say like, okay, that was good enough or not. It's quite a lot. So I think this is going to go, this is part of that overhang we were talking about earlier, but I think this is going to go quite far, and I think with current O-III, to say nothing of our next model, you can build a lot of experiences like this.”
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