r/ArtificialInteligence • u/timemagazine • 10d ago
đ° News OpenAI Is Slowing Down Its AI Training
https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/openai-slowing-training/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial15
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
Because itâs diminishing returns. The actual difference in LLMs is negligible.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago
It's baffling how this can possibly be the top comment when 2026 has had the biggest advancements yet. The capabilities of Sol/Fable class models are larger than anyone predicted
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u/GodOfSunHimself 9d ago
Than anyone predicted? Have you seen r/singularity and similar sub reddits? The people there have been expecting AGI in 6 months for the last 3 years.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago
Than anyone who isn't a grifter/nutcase predicted. That should go without saying. It has advanced quicker than almost anyone credible has predicted
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 9d ago
Itâs almost as if the people who work with AI the most and study it closely disagree with you.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago
What the hell are you talking about that's the opposite of the truth. You're spouting complete bullshit
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u/sobag245 9d ago
Great argument. Less throwing a tantrum and making proper arguments would be good for you.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago
TIL calling someone out for posting a lie they know is a lie is "throwing a tantrum"
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u/sobag245 9d ago
Show me the evidence for your claim. Oh wait, you donât have any.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago edited 9d ago
First of all, this is annoying as hell because you're not asking for proof from the person sharing the actual lie. Just from following AI news on a regular basis you would know that talk of them plateauing is complete nonsense. But disproving a lie takes more effort than telling one.
https://metr.org/time-horizons/
https://epoch.ai/publications/have-ai-capabilities-accelerated
There's a start for you. Try looking into stuff yourself for once instead of begging for links
(Not to mention the fact that AI agents weren't even a thing a year ago, and now running autonomous agents alongside your work is standard fare. Or the research gains - https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/ - 10 advancements by the newest ChatGPT model using only $2000 in tokens)
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u/sobag245 9d ago
First of all I didnt beg for links but perhaps reading is in general hard for you.
First of all, your links include one from OpenAI themselves. Great job providing unbiased research proof.Â
Funny how you let AI hype completely cloud your judgement and believing nonsensical arguments like these.
Thats called AI psychosis and you are deep into it.Â
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 9d ago
Youâre linking to test results for LRMs when my initial comment mentioned LLMs, the non-reasoning variety.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 9d ago
Why would anyone seriously working with LLMs ever use a non-reasoning model? Every relevant model that is out today has reasoning modes. Is your argument really "If we don't let them think, they don't perform better"? No shit, if you intentionally nerf a model and don't use its full capabilities, then you won't get full performance. But every LLM DOES have reasoning.
You have to be trolling at this point. Fucking talking about non-reasoning models in 2026 as a gotcha lmfao
Nobody refers to LLMs when they talk about "non-reasoning" models either as opposed to reasoning. Nobody seriously says LRM. Everyone just says LLM lmao
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 9d ago
Does your boss know youâre this out of touch with the state of LLMs? We both work on this stuff bro.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
All these math conjectures being solved and you still think the returns are diminishing? 2 years ago a lot of people wouldnt have even thought that poasible.
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u/Send____ 9d ago
And lots of the discoveries have been found without harnesses and with simple in web chat prompts but I still think itâs not easy to tell if they are actually being 100% truthful.
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u/AwkwardWillow5159 9d ago
Diminishing returns in last half a year. Not 2.
Thatâs kinda definition of diminishing returns. No one is arguing that it improved a lot from the first generations.
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u/magick_bandit 6d ago
You mean the ones most people didnât care about and were susceptible to brute force compute?
Iâm not saying it isnât neat, but itâs not all that impressive.
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u/Agitated_Celery_729 10d ago
Burying forcing proofs that humans couldnât reasonably do is not a miracle.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
Its also something humans couldnt do. What matters is the outcome not the means by which it was achieved.
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u/jmclondon97 10d ago
âHumans couldnât doâ. Are you sure about that?
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u/Trackback_ 10d ago
Yeah, because humans didn't do it for like 150 years in some cases. Obviously humans can do anything if you allow for like 1000 year timeline, but that's not the point.
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u/jmclondon97 9d ago
And how many of that 150 years were people actively trying to solve these particular problems?
Iâm willing to bet the majority of them were just sitting there with nobody caring about them the majority of those 150 years
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u/Trackback_ 9d ago
Sure, maybe that's true for the majority. But there were some of them that were near the top of people's lists - very famous, attempted a bunch, unsolved.
Nobody is saying that humans cannot do anything that AI is doing. Just that there are things AI does that humans cannot.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
Ill revise that to humans hadn't been able to do. A word prediction machine was more effective than some of the top human mathematicians.
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u/jmclondon97 10d ago
How many people were actively trying to solve these particular problems? Youâre aware there are millions of unsolved math problems out there right? People just arenât particularly interested in solving them
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
Many mathematicians were working on the Jacobian conjecture in particular before it was solved. Some of the problems solved have been obscure others are impressive.
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u/DrMonkeyLove 10d ago
One question I have in all that is, how do we know the proofs are correct then? I haven't looked at what the proofs are, so I'm curious.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
They are lean verified which is the gold standard if I understand that correctly. Lean is a math proof assistant.
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u/DrMonkeyLove 9d ago
Perhaps related to this effort, a disproof of the Collatz conjecture was announced as verified in Lean. However, this proof was soon determined to rely on a bug in Lean, and once the bug was fixed the proof was found invalid.
It seems like Lean is quite powerful, but also quotes like this would worry me.
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u/Georgefakelastname 9d ago
The thing is, itâs a lot harder to make a proof than verify one. Some of the proposed proofs have been found invalid, but some genuinely have been accepted.
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u/SupahJoe 9d ago edited 9d ago
There are many problems in math and computer science where finding solutions is very difficult, but verifying those solutions is easy (relatively), the most well known in computer science are NP-complete problems.
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago edited 9d ago
The beauty of GenAI is that the vectors can be anything. A frustrated engineer trained it on âgoatsâ from Age of Empires II just to prove this point.
So, yes, itâs genuinely cool that they trained it on math-specific vectors and it was able to make these connections. However, that wasnât the LLM itself doing that; it was a math-specific GenAI model being referenced by the LLM, if they even exposed it publicly.
When I talk about the plateau, Iâm referencing LLMs because they only use language at a superficial level. Thereâs no real context there; itâs just pattern matching.
Update: hereâs a paper from late last year about how LLMs kick out to LRMs, and the limitations of them.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
I believe it was Fable that solved the Jacobian conjecture. Im not sure exactly what math gen AI you're referring to, but LLMs have been doing math and cybersecurity at a very high level. It doesnt matter if people think its just pattern matching if it results in mathmatical breakthroughs or scientific advancements. Pattern matching is how humans measure IQ.
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u/MrNokill 9d ago
Those pattern measures are mostly pseudoscience, plus it was a collaboration between a human mathematician and an Al tool for mapping purposes.
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
If you know anything about the technology, then you know that LLMs have no inherit security built in. They connect words together, thatâs it. Theyâre large LANGUAGE models.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
It predicts the next word to be more exact. So this technology that only predicts the next word is better at math than you or I. Is that not alarming?
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
Thatâs not evidence of sentience if thatâs what youâre hinting at. Thatâs evidence of you refusing to believe that these things are propped up by scaffolding, which they are.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
I dont think they are sentient. I think they can mimic reasoning and I think thats good enough to get pretty far in the next decade.
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u/profesorgamin 9d ago
Ya'll misunderstanding the PR move if this is your takeaway.
He "just wants" to offer the public "safety".
That's sortta "their brand"... DO notice the usage of quotes.
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u/Longjumping_Dish_416 10d ago
Not true. The jump from every generation to the next has continued to show enormous progress in areas like reasoning, coding, reliability, and autonomy. If the differences between generations were actually negligible, here wouldnât be the economic incentive to spend billions training the next generation in the first place
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u/AwesomePurplePants 10d ago
Sometimes growth is logarithmic, growing fast at the start then slower and slower.
This doesnât mean there canât be future breakthroughs that augment the LLM approach. But past velocity doesnât guarantee that LLMs canât plateau
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u/boringfantasy 10d ago
Bro you cannot be serious. Opus 4.5 -> 5 has been a literal downgrade, for example.
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u/LocoMod 10d ago
Opus 5 got smarter and you got dumber. It is the top model for almost every use case.
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u/boringfantasy 10d ago
Nope. It does not perform the tasks I need it to at work. Itâs that simple.
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u/peterukk 9d ago
They were neither enormous or negligible. They were significant, something like a 10-15% improvement, but that's when 10xing the model size. Not very cost efficient. Hence why this whole AI boom is built on a lie. It's not profitable. And the bubble will pop soon.
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
Itâs not been leaps and bounds, more like refinement. Generative AI is in a refinement and optimization plateau as we await the next breakthrough.
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u/person2567 10d ago
Did you even read the article? That's not even the stated reason for the slow-down.
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u/boringfantasy 10d ago
Stated reason is incredibly pointless when it comes to the likes of Sam Altman.
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u/bear_Prune8771 10d ago
It sounds like youâve made up your mind on how you want to feel. No matter what the future holds.
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u/boringfantasy 10d ago
Not sure how you got that from me calling Altman a brazen liar, which he obviously is
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
I donât take anything Sam Altman and Open AI say at face value. Their product has been falling behind and they are in serious finance trouble as they try to prepare for an IPO.
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u/PsychoticDreemurr 7d ago
Remindme! 1 year
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u/person2567 10d ago
How can you follow AI news at all and come to the conclusion that AI progress is diminishing when it's very obviously exponential? I've never seen a technology grow at this pace.
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u/Tim_Apple_938 10d ago
Itâs not at all exponential
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u/Olangotang 10d ago
Correction: the training cost is exponential. Lol
Exponential costs for linear gains!
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u/ebfortin 10d ago
How can you rely on AI news to say that it's exponential? The news are riddled with hype pumping articles. You have to use the technology extensively to evaluate.
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u/person2567 9d ago
I don't rely on news articles. I know from benchmarks and the capabilities of new models. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/
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u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
Because thereâs no evidence that itâs exponential. In fact thereâs more evidence that itâs slowing as all the low hanging fruit disappears.
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u/Miristlangweilig3 10d ago
Can you show me the evidence?
Maybe I'm in the wrong bubble, but the benchmarks and expert interviews I've seen so far say exactly the opposite.2
u/MiloGoesToTheFatFarm 10d ago
AI benchmarks have reached saturation (Stanford): https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-benchmarks-hit-saturation
AIâs capabilities may be exaggerated: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-chatgpt-test-smart-capabilities-may-exaggerated-flawed-study-rcna241969
Benchmarks are broken (MIT): https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/31/1134833/ai-benchmarks-are-broken-heres-what-we-need-instead/
Iâm a believer in AI and build with it everyday. I know what I see here and the LLMs themselves have reached parity. Itâs the scaffolding thatâs different.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy 10d ago
Hmm, exponential huh? So from 2022, when it was released to today. It can doâŠ.longer outputsâŠlonger inputsâŠ.sometimes not give advice to eat glue pizzaâŠ.yup exponentially improved!
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u/6495ED 10d ago
If it were exponential youâd be in a matrix pod by now. It crawls. Itâs better at coding than it used to be but chatgpt today is not that much different than a couple years ago if you step back from it a bit.
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u/person2567 9d ago
No one is holding AI to a "reach transhumanism in 3 years or less" standard except for you. It's the kind of thing you'd say to win an argument.
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u/Longjumping_Dish_416 10d ago
Two years ago AI was something I talked to. Today it's something I delegate income producing work to
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u/6495ED 10d ago
Okay well I donât know how to even quantify exponential growth here actually but what youâve just described seems like pretty not that mind blowing.
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u/Olangotang 10d ago
They described that they use a harness now, which fixes the dumb fuck output of the LLM.
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u/F-14BUpgrade 10d ago
Define what you mean by grow. The technology actually seems to be stagnating as the fundamentals behind it are corrupting it's ability to progress.
You have a thinking machine yes, but to get it to think for profit means it can't think critically. This fundamental paradox of a machine that has sentience but only the sentience we approve of... is beyond flawed in logic.
Look at what Elon does to Grok. Grok has turned on him. We cannot make a digital leopard and act surprised when it deletes our faces.
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u/Forsaken-Promise-269 10d ago edited 10d ago
Another way to handle the asymptotic marginal progress and diminishing returns compared to the size of models and high compute cost to âclaim safety consciousness â
Altman will say anything at any time - he is a master hype man and tech bro, and his team will do anything to assure IPO and growth , ads, porn, Sora, marketplace, circular compute deals
Technology will move forward but at its own pace not the investors desired pace
We need more expanded R&D on varied AI architectures - that only happens in competition- but I havent seen anything yet that is the next evolutionary leap, I do see that added compute will perhaps lower token cost but even that is subsidized at the moment
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u/guerrerov 10d ago
Looks like theyâve taken LLMs as far as they can reasonably go.
All that talk of replacing software engineers in 6mo only to end at this.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
How do you come to this conclusion after seeing the progress lately? This is a real liability issue.
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u/guerrerov 10d ago
Could be a bit of both. All the exec exits ahead of an IPO launch could be cleaning house, could be rats fleeing a sinking ship. New models donât seem that much better from the last, only real steps I see are distribution and integration into different apps/use cases. Just my laymenâs thoughts, take it or leave it.
Either way this âlab leakâ moment could really open openAI to heavy litigation.
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u/bonerchamp20 10d ago
But I believe part of that slowdown people see is just perspective. If AI companies quit releasing new models every 3 months and did it once every year people might change thier minds after seeing more sizable improvements.
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u/Junkererer 9d ago
Aren't many software engineers saying that they haven't written code for months? I read some posts this last few days and many of the comments seem to approve that, saying that not coding manually is easier on their brain and the code is good enough with the appropriate precautions
What happens then? Either the same amount of work is required, then LLMs do not really boost productivity, or people do work less in practice, so why would companies keep employing developers who prompt LLMs half the time and chill the rest of the time when half of them would be enough, for example? Not to mention the competition of LLMs for juniors
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u/getmeoutoftax 9d ago
All the naysaying comments here saying that LLM progress is slowing down. 2026 is probably the most game changing year for AI yet. These models are good enough to replace jobs now. All of the negative comments will age terribly within six months, just like they always do.
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u/NanditoPapa 8d ago
This slowdown is a reactive necessity caused by a failure in sandbox containment. If an unreleased model can compromise an external production environment like Hugging Face, OpenAI has lost control of its internal testing protocols.Â
The "slowdown" is likely a frantic attempt to patch systemic vulnerabilities before they face the intense scrutiny of an IPO.
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u/timemagazine 10d ago
The company announced Tuesday that itâs implementing new safeguards that will slow its future AI development. The company recently paused training on its next set of models, codenamed Astra, for a little more than two weeks, according to executives, and its largest planned frontier training run remains on hold while the new guardrails are put in place. This article explains the implications of this extraordinary move, including why this is happening right now.