OpenAI’s ‘Top Priority’ for AI Agents is Automating AI Research, Says Noam Brown

OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT-6 Astra, notched improvements at a variety of professional tasks, from designing video games to transcribing sheet music. But OpenAI’s main goal when training new AI models is making them better at AI research and development, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown told me. “The number one priority is recursive self-improvement, and by a pretty wide margin,” he said.

I sat down with Brown for a conversation for the first episode of AI Deep Dive, The Information’s new show exploring the hard problems on tech’s frontier. We discussed the future of AI agents, which can work autonomously to carry out digital tasks. Brown has spent the last three years at OpenAI, where he has pushed advancements in enabling AI models to reason through problems and act as agents.