Shortly after Hunter Lightman joined OpenAI as a researcher in 2022, he watched his colleagues launch ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing products ever. Meanwhile, Lightman quietly worked on a team teaching OpenAI’s models to solve high school math competitions.
Today that team, known as MathGen, is
considered instrumental to OpenAI’s industry-leading effort to create AI
reasoning models: the core technology behind AI agents that can do tasks on a
computer like a human would.
“We were trying to make the models
better at mathematical reasoning, which at the time they weren’t very good at,”
Lightman told TechCrunch, describing MathGen’s early work.
OpenAI’s models are far from perfect
today — the company’s latest AI systems still hallucinate and
its agents struggle with complex tasks.
But its state-of-the-art models have improved significantly on mathematical reasoning. One of OpenAI’s models recently won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad, a math competition for the world’s brightest high school students. OpenAI believes these reasoning capabilities will
translate to other subjects, and
ultimately power general-purpose agents that the company has always dreamed of
building.
ChatGPT was a happy accident — a
lowkey research preview turned viral consumer business — but OpenAI’s agents
are the product of a years-long, deliberate effort within the company.
“Eventually, you’ll just ask the
computer for what you need and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” said
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the company’s first developer conference in 2023. “These
capabilities are often talked about in the AI field as agents. The upsides of
this are going to be tremendous.”
