The Golden Age of AI Engineering — Alexander Embiricos & Romain Huet & Peter Steinberger, OpenAI

AI Engineer · 25 min · 316 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

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00:13Good morning, everyone.
00:15I'm Romain.
00:17Hey everyone, I'm Alexander.
00:18Wow, this room is incredible.
00:20There's over There's over 7,000 AI engineers here today with us.
00:25And you know, it's not just about who's talking about this technology.
00:29It's also about who's actually using it and pushing the frontier every day.
00:33So, we couldn't be more proud to be here with all of you today.
00:37And when we were thinking about this event with Alex, we kept coming back to the World's Fair.
00:42And the World's Fair made actually the future visible to everyone by building it in public, you know?
00:48Ideas that previously sounded impossible were actually suddenly there.
00:52People could see them.
00:53They could walk into them.
00:55And they could even start to believe in them.
00:57And honestly, this event has the exact same energy.
01:00The future of engineering is not arriving from somewhere else.
01:03It's really being built here by the people in this room and much faster than most expected.
01:09And that's why it's a little surprising that people keep saying that engineers are going away.
01:13The argument is that coding is, you know, abstracted away and therefore eventually we won't need engineers.
01:18Well, in fact, we think it's quite the opposite.
01:21You know, software ate the world.
01:23And then AI ate software.
01:27But now, what we're here to say is that the AI engineers are eating the world.
01:31AI engineers are the people here pushing the frontier.
01:34Yes.
01:37And you all are figuring out how this new capability can reach everyone.
01:42And there has never been a better time to be an engineer, in fact, because engineering was never about writing code.
01:47Engineering has always been about solving problems for yourself and for other people as well.
01:53It's about taking the latest science and combining it with design, with taste, with judgement, and most of all, imagination to make something that people can actually use.
02:02And in that sense, it's not the end of engineering.
02:05We think it's a return to the roots of engineering.
02:08And the technology we're building on is accelerating, getting faster and faster.
02:14For example, we used to ship a new model every 15 months or so, and now it's about roughly every 6 weeks.
02:21And in case you missed it, last week we launched a preview of the 5.6 series, and we're super excited to get into all of your hands.
02:28Now, building on top of all these models, the rate of product progress is relentless.
02:34And as a result, I don't have to tell you and the engineering feels completely different.
02:39So, just to go over a couple years of what for me were successive like mind-blowing experiences.
02:45You know, obviously for a long time we've had, you know, completion, and then we went to inline prediction, and then finally we had then we had command K where you could ask model to make a change,
02:53but they wouldn't test the work.
02:55Then models started testing the work, and now we have models taking on long, hard goals until they're done.
03:00And for me, each of these phases, I remember the first time was just mind-blowing, and then obviously afterwards you just get used to it and you're trying to get your work done.
03:09Yeah, in fact like I can't believe that build and test loop was not even part of the models just 2 years ago.
03:14This was a picture of me at Dev Day 2024, and I used 01 in preview at the time to build a mini drone in drone interface from scratch.
03:22And the slightly insane part is the model could not actually run the code or verify its own work, and I knew the demo would work most of the time, but surely not all of the time.
03:31So, I had to cross my fingers.
03:32You can kind of see here that I was pretty nervous, but hey, that's me.
03:36I only do live demos, so I never know what's actually going to happen each time.
03:40Luckily, it did work, and by Dev Day of last year in 2025, I was confident enough now the models could test their own work to kind of control an entire camera system and lighting system live.
03:50But yeah, we've come a long way.
03:51Yeah, so we refer to him as the demo god and you know, before the demo like I'll ask him so hey, how often does demo work?
03:58He'll be like, you know, three times out of four and we're all right, good luck.
04:01Um, obviously we've come miles since then and this year alone has been crazy.
04:05So, what we're putting up here are all the things that we've shipped so far.
04:08Not actually not even all, a selection of the things that we've shipped so far this year.
04:12Uh, my favorite things that we've shipped are like Codex app, goal mode, remote.
04:17These are things that really changes how it feels to do work.
04:20You know, obviously we couldn't do these things if we didn't use Codex to build Codex, but I think to me what is most interesting is that now Codex can do and agents can do any task that you can do on your own computer.
04:31And so, that means they're not just helping you with the coding, but they're helping you with what happens before the coding and they're helping you with what happens after the coding.
04:39And this is really key, right?
04:40I think there's been a lot of talk, there will be a lot of talk today about loops and if you can connect the agent to not only the work that you have to do, but why it has to be done, that's how you can get the agent to start to begin much more work.
04:50And then if you can connect it to what you do afterwards, review and deploy, that's how you help it land much more work.
04:55So, with all of this, of course we can move much faster, but to me as a product person, the most exciting thing is actually that we make better decisions around what to build.
05:04For instance, we try, we prototype many more ideas and we spend much more time with users.
05:10So, yes, that's all of you.
05:12So, wanted to pause and just give you all a big thank you both for the love and the constructive feedback.
05:18I would say it's safe to say that we, Codex and actually the entire industry wouldn't be here without you.
05:25Yeah, thank you so much for all the feedback.
05:26We're constantly listening to all of you.
05:28Thank you.
05:29[applause]
05:30Okay.
05:31So, the models are getting really good.
05:34I would say, if you pick like a medium length computer task and you give me and the model the same amount of time to get that task done, probably
05:44at least in my case, the model will do a better job than me for the average task.
05:48And so, okay, we're we're getting these models, you know, in some ways they're smarter than us.
05:51They can do almost anything.
05:53How should we shape that?
05:54What should the products that we use feel like?
05:57And so, to answer that, we look to our mission.
06:00The part of it here that I've got up is, you know, AGI that benefits all of humanity.
06:04And I think in order to do this, there are two main questions that I think about now.
06:08One is, how do we set up the agents to actually do things in the world?
06:12So, what can they do?
06:14You know, gradually agents are getting connected to more and more things.
06:16Then where do they run?
06:17More on that later.
06:19And then the other question is, how do we use these agents?
06:22For us, you know, what what should the product feel like around them?
06:24And for us, the goal is squarely not to automate engineers.
06:29Instead, the the product shape that we want is one that maximally empowers engineers.
06:34So, you know, if we think about what that product shape is, we actually think it's pretty simple.
06:38I I read a lot of sci-fi, and you know, watch superhero movies.
06:41And I actually think that the the simple ideas in there are approximately right.
06:45So, there are two modalities, roughly.
06:48Chat.
06:48I actually think I know some people think chat is dead.
06:50I think chat is underrated.
06:52Uh and some kind of hands-on experience.
06:56So, what you want is a single entity that you can ask for help with anything, anywhere.
07:02And then you want a a powerful collaborative UI that you can use when you want to inspect, steer, or shape things yourself.
07:09And so, I had Codex image gen me an illustration of this to help understand when you might want to use these things.
07:16And so, my analogy for you, yeah, I hope you like the image gen.
07:19Uh my analogy for you would be it's just like working with a team.
07:22Most of the time, you're just talking about stuff, and your team is just doing stuff.
07:27You don't actually want to watch over the shoulder, or like have to walk over to the workbench of your teammate for every single unit of work.
07:33Mostly, you just want to talk and let them cook.
07:35And then every now and then, you want to dig in and really dig in all the way to the weeds of things, and dig digging that problem together.
07:41And for us, as we build product, we have this idea that we want to make it so that you can retain this feeling of mastery of the work that we're doing,
07:49because that's really powerful.
07:50We don't want to make it feel like actually it's really hard to like get to the details and like, you know, disassemble the hardware in this case.
07:57So, the way that we're bringing to this to life is just the beginning, but this is why we built the Codex app.
08:03You get a very simple chat interface that you can use for coding and for anything else.
08:08And you know, you can have a conversation and then go deep as you want.
08:10So, in the case here, we have Homan's predicted score of this upcoming World Cup match.
08:15I hope I'm right.
08:17I hope I'm right.
08:17We'll see.
08:19[laughter]
08:19Okay.
08:20Um and what you can do here is you could go in and you can point at a very specific thing and say, "Hey, I want you to make this change."
08:25Or you can make this change yourself.
08:27And a fun story here is that actually I remember pitching some of you who I know are in the audience uh this idea before we started and I was told squarely like, "We I will never use such a tool.
08:38I will never leave my terminal."
08:39Uh or Vim or Emacs.
08:41Um but actually those people are now using it.
08:44And even internally like within our team, there were a lot of questions like, "Why should we build this?
08:49People love the CLI, they love the IDE."
08:51And it's a little subtle, but our take is that you can't really build that collaborative interface for any kind of work in a CLI.
08:58It's mostly chat.
09:00And then in an IDE, the order is wrong and so you're starting with the code, but now it's time to transition to like working with teammates where you chat first and you dig in when you need it.
09:09Totally.
09:10And we're moving really fast on this, on the product surface and the model layer, of course, but we're also trying to keep pace with all of you, right?
09:17Honestly, half the time I open X, I see someone in this room doing something that I had not realized Codex could actually do.
09:24And honestly, this is what pioneers do.
09:26You guys experiment, you set up tools for yourself, for your team, and in turn, we get inspired.
09:30We learn from you and eventually everyone benefits.
09:34And so we are helping uh uh you are helping us figure out like what to uh what to build next and also what the future of engineering should look like.
09:42But for that to work, one thing that we we really care about is that Codex cannot be a closed product that only OpenAI can improve.
09:49So we've intentionally designed Codex as a set of layers that anyone can build on.
09:54And we want to show you a little bit of that stack today and how it it manifests.
09:59First, it starts with the model and Alexander showed how quickly we're progressing on models.
10:04And you guys use these models through the responses API and guess what?
10:07This is how we built the Codex app, right?
10:09We use the same models and through the same API.
10:12We actually are building on the same thing that we give to developers.
10:16And when Codex needs something new, we always try to bake it into the API first so you can benefit as well.
10:22One example recently was compaction.
10:24Codex needed a way to compact long contexts for long-running tasks and so we'll build that into the API.
10:30So that means your agents can use the same primitives that we built for ourselves.
10:35Moving on to the next layer, the Codex harness is also open source so you can inspect it, you can fork it, you can adapt it.
10:42And we also took the same approach with Agent MD.
10:45Instead of reinventing a new file format for Codex for to follow instructions, we thought let's pick a name that other agents can actually use as well.
10:54The models are hard to default in the in the harness the models from OpenAI but they're not hard coded in there.
10:59So if you want to use an open model and keep the same agent loop, you can.
11:03And we also bring this Codex harness into the post-training process of our models.
11:08So that means the models can learn to call tools and navigate an environment that's actually something that's open source.
11:15Now take the open code team for instance.
11:17They actually were able to inspect how we have this like reference implementation and they could reuse the parts that make sense to them or change entirely all the rest and make different choices.
11:28I know for instance they were trying to see how we did like signing with ChatGPT and so they could look at the code and and and learn from it.
11:35And we think it's better than having developers reverse engineering how it builds what and and how we launch.
11:43But now let's say, speaking of subscriptions, that we want to go a level higher.
11:46And how you bring this harness into an app?
11:49And how do you let people sign in with their existing Codex subscription, for instance?
11:53Well, it turns out we had the same problem ourselves, cuz we wanted to build a VS Code extension and the Codex app.
11:59And we wanted to have a unified way to like actually control this harness.
12:02So we built app server, and we also made that open source.
12:06And the app server is not kind of a community adapter, it's really the path that we use for our own products.
12:12And you can use it, too.
12:13Toma, for instance, here, aka Demilyan on X, he built his own native app for Codex, called Codex Monitor, before we even launched the Codex app.
12:22Cuz he could build that using the app server.
12:25And now he works on our team, and he actually built Codex for iOS.
12:31And moving up the stack, at the app layer, we also want to make sure that innovation is not blocked on our own ideas.
12:37And so we built extensible primitives here, like the in-app browser that we showed on the screen, and plugins.
12:44So if you take, for instance, browser use and computer use, these were built as plugins using the exact same extension points that we have available for for all of you.
12:54And lastly, we also recently built role-specific plugins for Codex, say, to make it easier to to customize for people who work in data science or design, for instance.
13:04And these plugins are also open source.
13:05You can see under the hood and get inspired from them if that's useful.
13:09Our goal is really to keep making this as open and flexible as we can.
13:12And the best part is people can use their existing subscription in more and more places, from Open Code, Pi, Droids, Open Claw, to even Xcode and JetBrains as IDEs.
13:24And you can see how they're becoming quite a meaningful part of how people use these tools and that's really why we want to care about building this open ecosystem
13:32with all of you.
13:33So really if there's one thing I want you to take away from this section and this talk, it's this.
13:37We're not building one system for Open AI and a second system that's simplified for developers.
13:43At every layer, we actually use the thing that we give to you.
13:46And we want to thank all of you cuz every time you fork the harness, every time you find the edge of capabilities of the models, it means we get to learn and improve.
13:55And honestly, with 7,000 of the finest AI engineers in this room today, I'm confident that all of you will define a lot of how we uh will experience AI and how the world will experience AI in the future.
14:07So thank you.
14:10[applause]
14:14I want to give a shout-out to whoever over there is injecting energy.
14:16That's you, okay, thank you so much.
14:18Uh so, with all of your help, we are making agents explosively useful.
14:24Uh and so now the question is how do we get value out of them?
14:28And you know, that's not token maxing.
14:30We have a term for this that maybe you use as well.
14:34I don't know, is it on screen?
14:35Value maxing.
14:36So, you know, when we talk to engineering leaders, most of the conversation is about some themes relating to the idea of value maxing.
14:43So, we're going to walk you through a few common topics that come up, some things where we've already made a lot of progress, and some things where actually there's a lot more progress to still be made.
14:51So, the first one of these is cost efficiency.
14:54Everyone wants frontier intelligence.
14:57Pick your favorite eval, you want the best model.
15:00So, with terminal bench here for instance, that's GPT 5.6 Sol, and like I said, we can't wait for you to have it.
15:06But okay, you also want as much intelligence as you can get, and that's where efficiency comes in.
15:13Cost efficiency has been a focus for us for quite some time, and the results are continuing to pay off.
15:18So, for example, GPT 5.6 Terra, I think it's in like dark blue in there.
15:23Brings GPT 5.5 level intelligence, but at half the cost.
15:27And Luna there beats some pretty notable models in this eval.
15:31But at only $1 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
15:37I'll leave it up to you to compare those costs, but that is insane value.
15:41Yeah, we we we really can't wait to uh, to see all of you build uh, with GPT 5.6 and this new family of models.
15:47Now, the next thing I want to touch on is speed, right?
15:49GPT 5.3 could spark showed you what speed can unlock, but we also know that you all want frontier intelligence.
15:56You don't want to have a model that's like not as great as what you can operate at the very best.
16:01Well, this is GPT 5.6 Soul running on Cerebras, the frontier intelligence at now 750 tokens a second.
16:09We can't wait to see what you can build with this next month.
16:12And honestly, to put that in perspective, this is kind of like having a pretty substantial PR written in like 10 seconds.
16:19And it's not just about getting one answer faster, right?
16:22It's about what can you do with that speed?
16:25You can think about an agent taking different approaches, maybe like five or six in parallel, maybe like, you know, coming back and picking the best one in the time you would have taken to not even generate just one.
16:36So, we really can't wait to see what that can unlock when you have frontier intelligence, the very best at that speed.
16:42It really starts to feel less like waiting for an AI to respond and much more like a coworker that's like already showing you the results as it goes.
16:50Speaking of working with coworkers, um, can I get a show of hands?
16:54Who who is familiar with this kind of sight in offices?
16:59Okay.
17:00Okay, wow, a lot of you are very well behaved.
17:01I really see some people up front.
17:03Um, so yeah, a lot of people are keeping their laptops open so that agents can keep working.
17:09And this is funny, but you know, what we really want is to be able to shut our computers um, and we want to be able to run many tasks in parallel isolated on their own box.
17:20Now, we've been actually aiming at this from the start.
17:23Our first major launch was Codex Cloud, and it is due for some major upgrades coming soon.
17:29But, better yet, as we think about this, the future shouldn't have this awkward distinction between like a local task and a cloud task, and you have to decide where to run everything.
17:40Really, what you should have is kind of going back to what I was saying earlier.
17:43You should just have an agent, you talk to it wherever, whenever, about anything, and it should figure out, okay, what do I need to do, which environment is right for my work, and use whatever is available.
17:53In fact, Theo made this prediction over the weekend on this very topic.
17:57And it's a pretty acute tweet.
17:59Like, Alex, what do you think?
18:00Sooner or later than 6 months?
18:02I think the not in maybe not exact details, but the vibe of this tweet much sooner than 6 months.
18:07Yeah, I mean, at at the pace at which everything is going is going, I would not be surprised if it's sooner indeed.
18:11Um, Well, so now, you might be wondering, where's the live demo today?
18:17Uh, well, for this AI engineer, we wanted to do something a little different this time around.
18:23And we think it's a very unique moment for all of us to kind of reimagine how we work and how we build.
18:29And so, we wanted to bring a special guest who has bent what's possible with agents and really has pushed us to be more AGI pilled uh at OpenAI.
18:38So, with that, please welcome to the stage the claw father, Peter Steinberger.
18:43[applause]
18:48[applause]
18:50Peter, take it away.
18:51Thank you all.
18:53Thanks, Al.
18:56Good morning, everyone.
18:58You know, I love this picture because it reminds me just how much has changed in a few months.
19:06I was juggling 10 or more terminal windows, always waiting for one of them to finish, so I could steal the agent and queue new work.
19:16In In January, that felt like peak productivity.
19:21Today, it feels a little bit silly.
19:23I thought I was orchestrating.
19:25Really, I was polling.
19:27I was the scheduler, the router, and the memory.
19:33You know, at first, I paired with one agent.
19:36With 10 terminals, I was no longer pairing.
19:39I was managing 10 direct reports.
19:43Now, I mostly talk to a long-running manager, which delegates work to a team.
19:50For tricky work, I can still drop down and pair directly with a worker, but my default changed.
19:57I manage the manager of a small company of agents.
20:02Three changes made it possible.
20:05Number one, server-side compaction made long-running tasks reliable enough that I stopped optimizing around first sessions.
20:15Coordination lets one thread create and steer the right projects.
20:21And third, automation can wake the same manager when something happens.
20:26So, we have persistent context, delegation, and triggers.
20:32There's your loop.
20:34And once the loop starts working, you discover the next problem, the bottleneck keeps moving.
20:42You know, last year, I was primarily constrained by tokens.
20:49Now, I fixed that by joining OpenAI.
20:53I know I know the strategy does not scale.
20:57Then, my constraint shifted to token uh compute.
21:04All these threads run at the same time, and my MacBook starts sounding like a jet engine.
21:10That's mostly fixed by using test boxes.
21:13So, agents can run tests on a separate machine.
21:19Now, I'm primarily constrained by attention.
21:24And unlike tokens or compute, I can't simply add more of it.
21:28So, the most important skill is today is deciding where to spend it.
21:36Are you still staring at the agent while the code flies by?
21:42I know I know it's it's it feels cool, but with the earlier models, this was necessary.
21:49You know, you you you you see the agent go in a direction you don't like, you hit escape, you steer it, you steer it back.
21:57But, the latest generation of models is so good at understanding intent that it's a little bit of a waste of time to watch the agent generate code.
22:08Imagine someone files an issue on one of my open source projects.
22:14The manager wakes up, reads it against the project's goals, notes, and vision, and decides whether it might be a fit.
22:23If it does, it creates a worker.
22:26That worker investigates, implements the change, runs the tests, and another agent can review the result.
22:35I don't need to watch those agents work or consume every intermediary message.
22:43When the manager needs me, it returns a PR, the original issue, the proposed diff, maybe a video, or even a running build I can VNC into.
22:54I review once, I leave a note, I maybe approve, the loop continues, and it can land after the checks pass.
23:04The agent runs the inner execution loop.
23:08I set the direction and I make decisions in the outer loop.
23:14You know, Paul Paul thought he's already running a version of this.
23:18He pinned his chief of staff.
23:21It wakes up every 10 minutes and it coordinates his GitHub work.
23:25The agent creates threads in the sidebar so Paul can jump in whenever the work needs additional steering.
23:34You know, once the manager is long-lived tying it to a laptop just feels wrong.
23:42Codex can already move work between hosts.
23:45Open claw has a gateway and nodes.
23:49But neither feels like the final form.
23:54I don't even want to think where I work.
23:59My agent should be able to connect to any of my machines.
24:03They should know which work can be done in the cloud or which work requires my local machine.
24:13The manager shouldn't be a session trapped inside your app.
24:17It should be an agent that I can text, steer from Slack, or hear from wherever I am.
24:24Really, why can't I talk to my agent and have it design the whole loop for me?
24:32We haven't solved that yet.
24:34Models are advancing faster than the harnesses and organizations around them.
24:41Designing those things is the next engineering problem.
24:46That's where all of you come in.
24:49The future is not 20 terminals.
24:52It's better loops.
24:54Let's build them.
24:55Thank you.
24:57Thank you.