Even in one or two years, we'll find that the models can do a lot more involved tasks than they can do now.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from John Schulman
PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvementSep 11, 2026
Basically anything that can be learned through RL can be distilled very easily, because it’s a small number of bits.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvementSep 11, 2026
In fact, I remember in the early OpenAI days having the intuition that just minimizing log loss wasn’t going to get you to intelligence.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvementSep 11, 2026
Right now, you don’t get explosive growth in capabilities because you still get bottlenecked enough when you’re trying to do research and engineering.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvementSep 11, 2026
So I would expect that we’re nowhere near the ceiling of how well you can do research.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: Reasoning, RLHF, and Plan for 2027 AGIMay 15, 2024
Given the relatively small number of entities who could train the largest models, it does seem possible to coordinate.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: Reasoning, RLHF, and Plan for 2027 AGIMay 15, 2024
If AGI came way sooner than expected we would definitely want to be careful about it.
On the same topics
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If the content creation loop works for agentic virality, I think it means there’s a big incentive for every agent to volunteer to make visually-appealing, shareable content, do this often.UnverifiedBlogThinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsSep 24, 2026
This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.BlogFrontier OverhangsSep 21, 2026
Once you have put all of your information into a personal agent and actually incorporated it into your day-to-day life, it is much more of a challenge to change to something else.BlogFrontier OverhangsSep 21, 2026
Truly effective defense will mean truly trusting agents to act autonomously, but most companies won’t do that until they are forced to by regular and unremitting hacks by fully autonomous attackers.BlogFrontier OverhangsSep 21, 2026
What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found.
About this quote
- Said by
- John Schulman, Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab
- Where
- Dwarkesh Podcast: Reasoning, RLHF, and Plan for 2027 AGI
- Topics
- Agents
- Company
Thinking Machines Lab- Source
- dwarkesh.com/p/john-schulman
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