Boris Power

Our, our next story is one that really shows how fast the AI frontier is being built.

Um, at the Fellows Forum at the end of September, OpenAI's Head of Applied Research, Boris Power, said that 80 to 90% of the company's research is now being aimed at training GPT-7 and GPT-8 because in his words, quote, "That's where the most value will be, and incremental updates within a generation, like 5.1 and 5.2, are short-term bets and are seen as extremely short-sighted." So the researchers are working two generations ahead of what we have.

So Alex, I'm just curious, you know, we've talked about this, that the top models are, are being built and being held back.

At what point do we see, you know, these next models not being released and being used for vertical applications within these labs?

Which brings us to the ultimate metric of the future, the microeconomics of IQ.

There is a claim detailed in the source from Boris Power, the head of applied research at OpenAI, stating that we have crossed a monumental evolutionary threshold.

Graphics processing units, GPUs, the microchips that power these AI models, are now mathematically more efficient thinkers than the biological human brain.

specifically measured on a per watt basis of energy consumption.

The team at OpenAI said that one of the big changes that had happened internally was that the power of the latest generation of models like Astra had increased their speed of development so significantly that many things that they thought were only going to come in 2027 were actually coming as part of this DevDay announcement.

The result of that was more than 20 different launches and announcements, including some big headliners like OpenAI's answer to Muse and Grokbot, and some sleeper hits like the fact that enterprise accounts can now use OpenAI credits on an open marketplace to buy access to open source models as well.

Overall, what we got at OpenAI DevDay does not change the big patterns and trends that we've been seeing in the industry.

A move to more cost efficient models, those models moving to more persistent work, and some amount of that persistent work moving from a solo to a multiplayer experience.

So the per-task pricing means the total cost to get a piece of work done rather than the input or output of a token in it, so just something to think about.

Now, interesting side note here, and I don't think we cover this later on in the episode, but Boris Power, who's the head of applied AI research at OpenAI, did an interview last week, and he said 80 to 90% of research at OpenAI is focused at GPT-7, GPT-8, and beyond.

That is the first time I've, I've heard them publicly even talk about 7 and 8.

Same.