Creating Agents that Co-Create — Karina Nguyen, OpenAI
Apr 30, 2025 · 24:22
Karina Nguyen, an AI researcher at OpenAI and former Anthropic researcher, discusses two major AI scaling paradigms—next-token prediction (pretraining) and reinforcement learning on chain of thought—that shift AI from narrow tools to collaborative agents that co-create. Pretraining builds world understanding by predicting the next token, but hard tasks like math and creative writing require chain of thought reasoning, scaled with OpenAI’s O1 model. Post-training via RLHF and synthetic data enables rapid iteration, and the next stage is co-innovators: agents with reasoning, tool use, long context, and creativity. Nguyen shares product lessons from developing ChatGPT and Claude: 100K context via file uploads, ChatGPT Tasks for scheduled reminders that scale with model capabilities, and Canvas as a flexible interface for co-writing, coding, and research that can morph into an IDE, a tutor, or a data scientist. She envisions a future of invisible software creation where AI generates personalized, multimodal outputs on the fly, reducing reliance on clicking links, and the interface becomes a blank canvas that adapts to user intent.
