Person

Dan Roberts

OpenAI RL team lead

Artwork for OpenAI's Dan Roberts: Why AI Can Now Make Discoveries
The MAD Podcast with Matt TurckDan Roberts

OpenAI's Dan Roberts: Why AI Can Now Make Discoveries

Dan Roberts argues that modern reinforcement learning and test-time compute are turning language models into systems that can reason, explore, and sometimes make genuine scientific discoveries. He uses OpenAI’s recent math work, RLHF, and physics-inspired thinking to explain why AI progress looks smooth, why scale alone is not enough, and why future models may help drive science itself.