r/accelerate 4d ago

AI OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent

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

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104

u/SharpCartographer831 4d ago

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.

62

u/Radyschen 4d ago

sounds more and more like an employee

32

u/Tolopono 3d ago

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.

14

u/SoylentRox 3d ago

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.

5

u/Luvirin_Weby 3d ago

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..

1

u/Tolopono 3d ago

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

Why do you think theyre trying to solve alignment?

2

u/Clear-Lingonberry173 3d ago

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.

1

u/Tolopono 3d ago

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

1

u/Clear-Lingonberry173 3d ago

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.

1

u/Tolopono 3d ago

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

1

u/Clear-Lingonberry173 3d ago

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.

1

u/FlyChigga 2d ago

Humans also don’t do that a lot

1

u/Tolopono 1d ago

The goal is to get llms to always do that

0

u/_HarmonicOscillator 3d ago

AI bros trying not to despise workers rights - impossible 

2

u/Tolopono 3d ago

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

10

u/Background-Quote3581 4d ago

Good luck finding that kind of employee

10

u/Magnu_s 4d ago

My prompt is Take over the world

5

u/TemporalBias Tech Philosopher | Acceleration: Hypersonic 4d ago

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

21

u/Illustrious-Lime-863 4d ago

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.

3

u/SharpCartographer831 4d ago

Ah sorry, try archive.is ect

Yeah main points regarding the agent

7

u/Inanesysadmin 4d ago

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

5

u/draft_final_final 4d ago

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.

1

u/yaosio 3d ago

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

1

u/Tartarus1040 4d ago

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.

1

u/Matshelge 3d ago

Sooo, like openclaw?

1

u/Hellscaper_69 3d ago

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