Inside OpenAI’s quest to make AI do anything for you
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.
