Creating automated researchers powered by AI will be crucial if AI is to lead to the rapid scientific progress that many are predicting, and OpenAI has some timelines on when it expects such researchers to be created.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a conversation with its Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki has said that OpenAI aims to create an AI research intern by September 2026, and an AI researcher by September 2028. “We have set internal goals of having an automated AI research intern by September of 2026 running on hundreds of thousands of GPUs, and a true automated AI researcher by March of 2028,” Altman later posted on X.
Altman said that it wasn’t necessarily a given that the timelines would be met. “We may totally fail at this goal, but given the extraordinary potential impacts we think it is in the public interest to be transparent about this,” he added.
Altman also predicted how such AI researchers would lead to new breakthroughs. “In 2026 we expect that our AI systems may be able to make small new discoveries; in 2028 we could be looking at big ones. This is a really big deal; we think that science, and the institutions that let us widely distribute the fruits of science, are the most important ways that quality of life improves over time,” Altman said.
There are already indications that AI systems are able to perform scientific tasks. OpenAI and Google have won Gold medals at the International Math Olympiad, and they’ve also won gold medals at top coding competitions. There are also early indications that AI is helping researchers speed up their research process.
And it’s this ‘speed up’ that seems to be at the heart of the predictions about how AI will unleash a new era of science and discovery. AI researchers can be made in large numbers, and they’ll never tire or want vacations. These AI researchers can be tasked with solving difficult scientific problems, and as they make new discoveries, the pace of change will only accelerate, leading to rapid technological advancements. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously said that AI will lead to a century’s worth of scientific progress in 5-10 years, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis has said that AI could potentially cure all diseases, and OpenAI has said that AI will lead to the creation of new scientific knowledge. And with OpenAI believing that fully-automated researchers are just three years away, this new era of scientific discovery might well be closer than most people expect.