Research acceleration: an inside view from OpenAI

OpenAI says it achieved an automated research intern in September of this year, as announced as a goal last fall, meaning it can complete well-defined research tasks under human guidance that would take a skilled researcher days, and says it is progressing toward an automated AI researcher by March 2028. Its disclosed internal data shows that by mid-August, the median research user used more than $600 of API-priced inference per day, the 90th percentile user used more than $7,000 of tokens per day, and the entire research organization had 3.1 agent workdays for every 1 human workday; August had the highest number of experiments per active experimenter since tracking began in January 2025. OpenAI says agents still require substantial human guidance, and in 4-8 hour tasks, more than half of successful cases involved at least one intervention.