How OpenAI’s Jerry Tworek found a new way forward for large language models

The veteran AI researcher was a key developer of OpenAI’s o1 model, which ‘thinks’ longer and harder about problems.

The impressive intelligence gains in OpenAI’s models over time have mainly come from training them with progressively more training data, for longer amounts of time, and with massive computing power. But in 2024 new training data has become scarce and it’s become very expensive to further scale up computing power, so AI labs have sought new ways to continue pushing models toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that’s generally smarter than human beings.