OpenAI Application Research Head: 80% to 90% of research focuses on GPT-7 and beyond

User choblin29 posted that Boris Power, the head of application research at OpenAI, stated that the company has 80% to 90% of its research focused on GPT-7, GPT-8, and subsequent models. Power believes that improvements within the same generation of models are viewed internally as very short-term investments that can be used to accelerate current learning, but not as a long-term strategy.

According to the post compiled, the relevant path is to first build large cutting-edge models, then use them as teacher models to distill into smaller, cheaper models. Power mentioned that GPT-6 Astra could be distilled into models like Luna and believes that a better way to build small specialized models might be to first train a more capable general model. He also stated that the current biggest issue is not model performance; most users still do not understand the work that existing AI is already capable of completing.