OpenAI publishes internal research acceleration report: automated research intern goal met, targeting automated AI researcher by March 2028

OpenAI 发布内部研究加速报告：已达成自动化研究实习生目标，推进 2028 年 3 月自动化 AI 研究员

OpenAI published an internal report stating it has met its goal of an automated research intern by September 2026—a system that can complete well-defined research tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days. The next target is an automated AI researcher by March 2028. Internal data shows researchers using coding agents throughout the day, with code output and experiment volume rising, and agents handling more complex tasks with higher success rates. OpenAI cautions that overall research pace won't match these metrics one-to-one due to many bottlenecks. On safety, they paused RL training on latest models after the Hugging Face incident, resumed some workloads under stronger controls, and raised safety standards. The post does not disclose specific benchmark scores for the research intern or a percentage-of-completion figure for the 2028 target.

Why it matters: OpenAI's official blog discloses internal research acceleration progress, with a concrete timeline: 'automated research intern' achieved, 'automated AI researcher' targeted for March 2028, backed by internal usage data. This is the first time a top lab has publicly quantified ...