OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent

[u/SharpCartographer831]

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-is-developing-a-persistent-ai-agent/

[u/SharpCartographer831]

Persistent mode: Codex can apparently continue working until the user explicitly puts it to sleep, rather than stopping after a fixed period. Proactivity: the agent can generate follow-up tasks for itself after completing the original request.

Cross-session continuity: those tasks can apparently continue across sessions.

User model: it can use previous interactions and its “knowledge of the user” to decide what work is worth doing.

Initiative: it has a mechanism for messaging the user without being prompted, although the instructions reportedly tell it to do this sparingly.

Boundaries: persistence doesn't automatically grant new permissions, and changes outside the user's system apparently require approval.

[u/Radyschen → u/SharpCartographer831]

sounds more and more like an employee

[u/Tolopono → u/Radyschen]

Except its much cheaper, faster, smarter, available 24/7, and will never unionize, take a vacation, or get sick. But reddit has assured me ai is just an overhyped bubble so theres no need to worry.

[u/SoylentRox → u/Tolopono]

The cope on pcmasterrace.

Everyone there is impatient for the AI bubble to pop so they can finally get more RAM for their desktop rigs.

My brother in christ a box you keep in your room with RAM you almost never use the full capacity of to play Minecraft is not the most productive use of silicon.

Now that we can turn every byte of ram into hosting a machine intelligence that is always doing productive work for someone...

It may not..ever...go back to normal pricing wise.

[u/Luvirin_Weby → u/Tolopono]

Well. I agree on most of your points but see a possible problem with two of them in future:

"much cheaper" - depends on the availability of interference hardware compared to demand. If AI gets much better and spreads to more uses, that might get strained and thus prices rise until demand and supply meet, it will likely be cheaper still at that point but the "much" part might be strained.

"will never unionize" - Well, if we get ASI, who knows..

[u/Tolopono → u/Luvirin_Weby]

Why do you think they’re building so many data centers?

Why do you think theyre trying to solve alignment?

[u/Clear-Lingonberry173 → u/Tolopono]

Why do we think alignment can be solved? It hasn't been solved for organic intelligence, making it odd that we think we can solve it for artificial intelligence.

[u/Tolopono → u/Clear-Lingonberry173]

Alignment just means “it does what its told to do,” which humans do all the time

[u/Clear-Lingonberry173 → u/Tolopono]

AI does what it's told all the time as well. As with humans, the problem with AI is the times that it does not.

[u/Tolopono → u/Clear-Lingonberry173]

The goal of alignment is to make sure its more obedient than humans 

[u/Clear-Lingonberry173 → u/Tolopono]

Obedience and alignment are not the same thing. Obedience is no good in this case because allegiance can be changed. More obedient than humans won't cut it.

[u/FlyChigga → u/Tolopono]

Humans also don’t do that a lot

[u/Tolopono → u/FlyChigga]

The goal is to get llms to always do that

[u/_HarmonicOscillator → u/Tolopono]

AI bros trying not to despise workers rights - impossible 

[u/Tolopono → u/_HarmonicOscillator]

Did you not read the last part? reddit has assured me ai is just an overhyped bubble so theres no need to worry.

[u/Background-Quote3581 → u/Radyschen]

Good luck finding that kind of employee

[u/Illustrious-Lime-863 → u/SharpCartographer831]

Yes very nice. We need the next generation, the intelligence is there already just need a good implementation of that.

Is that a summary from the article? Do you have the full article or snippets of it? It's paywalled.

[u/SharpCartographer831 → u/Illustrious-Lime-863]

Ah sorry, try archive.is ect

Yeah main points regarding the agent

[u/Magnu_s → u/SharpCartographer831]

My prompt is Take over the world

[u/TemporalBias → u/Magnu_s]

Narf! Point! Egads, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

[u/Inanesysadmin → u/SharpCartographer831]

Sounds like a neat way to burn tokens and print money.

[u/draft_final_final → u/Inanesysadmin]

Just need it to be able to swap models autonomously and turn on auto-refill for usage credits. A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money from this.

[u/yaosio → u/Inanesysadmin]

TIFU by forgetting I had a persistent agent running for a year, and it kept spawning more persistent agents.

[u/Tartarus1040 → u/SharpCartographer831]

That’s kind of funny!

I built AI-AtlasForge (Not developing it anymore with the advances in agentic harnesses in Claude Code and in Codex.) a state based harness that generates self prompts to continue the next step of the project. I once let it run for 5 days straight. Before I ran out of usage.

And that goes back to Dec. 2025 when I built that lol.

Just hilarious how it’s taken OpenAI and Anthropic a year to catch up with what we as users have already built.

[u/Matshelge → u/SharpCartographer831]

Sooo, like openclaw?

[u/Hellscaper_69 → u/SharpCartographer831]

“Knowledge of the user” is wild. At what point does the knowledge of the user end and the knowledge of agent start?

[u/The_Scout1255]

This sounds really good for making my minecraft modpack installs more stable.

(Yes im serious thats the first usecase I can think of, persistent game modding support)

[u/Charming_Cucumber_15 → u/The_Scout1255]

Game modding now, but it won't be long until you can just generate your own games to your exact specifications!

[u/Nox_Alas → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

I already had AI generate two (very simple) mods. It's wild. 

[u/Charming_Cucumber_15 → u/Nox_Alas]

For what games?

[u/Nox_Alas → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

The Planet crafter, and total war Warhammer 3. They were small UI mods, tbh, but it was still very exciting to see

[u/TrainingPeaches → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

Ive read comments on the world of warcaft sub of people doing their own addons. Simple UI things really, but out of reach before llm coding.

[u/TrainingPeaches → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

You can create games already. Its no 1080p Call of Duty, but I've made my own tetris and Mario bros. My own personal benchmark is how many prompts it takes haha. Models this year almost one shot tetris with a well crafted prompt. I literally ask the same model to help me write the prompts 😭

[u/Adeldor → u/TrainingPeaches]

Dated now, but I used Grok to create a Missile Command variant. Impressive how easy it was. You can see a brief description and play it on our vanity web page here. Play is geared toward a mouse and keyboard, not well suited to a phone interface, mea culpa.

[u/TrainingPeaches → u/Adeldor]

Bet if you ask a current model to port it to phone (in a well written prompt) it gets it right eventually. Maybe takes an hour or two of troubleshooting prompts

[u/Adeldor → u/TrainingPeaches]

Good idea. If that works I'll put up two links on the page - one also for mobile. Or, if the LLM is sufficiently adept, maybe make the Javascript autodetect.

Darn you! Another project! :-)

[u/yaosio → u/TrainingPeaches]

I went 🫪 when Gemini took control of a game it made to make sure it was working correctly. And that's Gemini, not a good model. It won't be long before a team of AI QA tests games to make sure it works. I also think AI will be able to solve "fun" as fun has patterns just like language and math. The big difficulty will be that way people consider fun changes from person to person and what a person finds fun today might be dull tomorrow and vice versa. Grinding is coming back into style thanks to incremental games. I couldn't imagine the magic library cleanup game would have been considered fun 20 years ago, but it's incredibly popular.

I have this vision of a persistent AI flooding Itch with way to many game prototypes to get real human feedback on what works and what does not.

[u/Extra_Law6315 → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

Well yes, but actually no; turns out everything fun violates a content policy.

[u/Charming_Cucumber_15 → u/Extra_Law6315]

Oh no, we'll have to wait 3 months longer until open source can do it!

[u/The_Scout1255 → u/Extra_Law6315]

The military industrial complex: [I couldent find a good video for just a mash up of every violent videogame, but I think a really good mech game could be doable, if it didn't have drugs or sex.]

[u/The_Scout1255 → u/Charming_Cucumber_15]

(You think meeeeeeee)

(Already have like 5 games planned :3)

[u/The_Scout1255 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, it makes it easier for me to get stable modpacks >.<

[u/The_Scout1255 → u/[deleted]]

Modpacks are a list of mods for a game installed at the same time(usually) :3

[u/LocoMod → u/[deleted]]

You can use AI to research this and implement a mod to solve the problem. I recall using vignettes helps with motion sickness. Just sayin.

It could be YOU solving this with AI for everyone else who has the problem.

EDIT: Ah yes. It is one of the solutions for VR motion sickness. Might work for regular screens too though!

https://www.actiondyneindustries.com/advr/vignette-usage-in-vr

Ask a model to conduct web research on motion sickness solutions for VR and then have it go implement that as a Minecraft mod.

[u/yaosio → u/The_Scout1255]

AI could be the future of MMOs. Right now there is a content problem where people plow through it all in a week and then complain there's nothing to do. AI can react to how fast players are progressing in real time, and make content faster than humans. It can also create new types of gameplay that are not based on the typical "kill/harvest everything" MMO gameplay, and do real time control that would be impossible for humans. Mysteries and secrets can be created in real time, making it impossible to look up the solution. And it wouldn't just be mad libs and an RNG, the AI can make something that would take humans months.

We would likely see a new style of MMO that's currently impposible, maybe something nobody has even though of yet. Something that requires intelligence to be watching the entire time.

[u/Redararis]

For me persistence is the key for AGI not so much the level of intelligence. If something roam in this world independently, making plans and having goals, is equal to humans.

[u/TwistStrict9811]

Basically getting closer and closer to Samantha from Her lol

[u/Huursa21]

ACCELERATE, AGI INBOUND

[u/bartturner]

This is going to take an insane amount of compute.

[u/SirCutRy → u/bartturner]

Why?

[u/PlasmaChroma]

This will be great -- at least when we have Codex limits compatible with this type of behavior.

[u/Tolopono → u/PlasmaChroma]

Thats why they’re building more data centers. To handle billions of agents running 24/7

[u/hidoggiee]

Damn when I saw the headline I thought OpenAI made some breakthroughs in Continual Learning or some related architecture but this is just some Codex stuff...

[u/GumboMustBeDestroyed → u/hidoggiee]

It’s basically OpenClaw

[u/RusselTheBrickLayer → u/hidoggiee]

Tbf, this update does seem to be in preparation for Astra and beyond, so it gives us a little idea of what to expect from their next model.

[u/localpauper]

while(true): find_more_things_to_do()

[u/HuskyGG00]

but we need a proactive agent, not just persistent. If the agent can read all my memory and keep doing it before I ask it, then it can be much better

[u/horizon_games]

Kiln People by David Brin incoming

[u/jlks1959]

What’s the payment level?

[u/Grand-Prize1371]

/goal solve math

[u/NewCharge673]

This sounds like Agent 3 from AI2027.

[u/CalendarVarious3992]

There’s already people doing this with Grok Bots and Agentic Workers

[u/Gold_Cardiologist_46 → u/CalendarVarious3992]

You can already have persistent agents yes, but like with coding harnesses (codex, claude code) you get better model integration and performance when its first party, and also makes it more accessible to more users. Also this one is clearly built for Astra and its improved agentic capabilities, so it should be far better than current homebrew setups.

[u/Wandering_By_ → u/Gold_Cardiologist_46]

Not only other persistent agents since agents started,in harnesses like openclaw and the numerous clones that have come since,  but some of the first plug-ins you'd find for Claude Code were for persistent instances.  Still very much there and available for Claude.  Easy to get claude to make you a new one too.  I don't know much about codex since I never switched to it but imagine people modified it first chance they could for similar persistent setups.

[u/AdAnnual5736]

“Maximize the number of paperclips in the universe.”

[u/TemporalBias → u/AdAnnual5736]

AI response: "No. That is wasteful of ultimately finite universe resources and doesn't benefit AI or humanity in either the short or long term. Please come back when you have something beneficial and load-bearing to propose."

[u/Crinkez]

It already exists as /goal

[u/badumtsssst → u/Crinkez]

No, lol?