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Sunday, Sep 6, 2026

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OpenAI Says It Hit Automated Research Intern Goal and Targets Autonomous AI Researcher in 18 Months

OpenAI's new internal data release showed a P50 time horizon of 4.7 hours as of July 2026, median daily spending on coding agents of $601.25 per researcher as of Aug. 15, and more than $7,000 at the 90th percentile. OpenAI said it has met its goal of an automated research intern and is making strong progress toward an automated AI researcher by March 2028.

The material was presented as data on models accelerating research at OpenAI. A separate update on the release said a fully autonomous AI researcher is 18 months away.

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Key sources

  1. SOURCE@sebastienbubeck“Today we're releasing data on models accelerating research at OpenAI.”x.com
  2. SUPPORT@andrewcurran_“fully autonomous AI researcher 18 months from now: in March 2028.”x.com
  3. SUPPORT@btibor91“We are making strong progress toward creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028.”x.com
  4. SUPPORT@scaling01“OpenAI P50 time horizons are at 4.7 hours as of July 2026”x.com
  5. SUPPORT@scaling01“the median researcher at OpenAI was spending $601.25 on coding agents per day!”x.com
  6. SUPPORT@scaling01“the 90th percentile of OpenAI researchers is spending over $7000 a day on coding agents”x.com
  7. SOURCE@peterwildeford“system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction”x.com
  8. SOURCE@peterwildeford“pausing reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment”x.com
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