Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Have a ‘Legitimate AI Researcher’ by 2028

Why It Matters

A research‑grade AI could accelerate scientific breakthroughs and reshape the R&D landscape, giving OpenAI a strategic edge in the emerging AI‑driven innovation market.

Summary

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company aims to create an AI system capable of functioning as a “legitimate AI researcher” by 2028. The roadmap hinges on two pillars: continued breakthroughs in core algorithms and a dramatic increase in “test‑time compute,” meaning the amount of processing power an model can devote to solving a problem. By extending inference compute, OpenAI expects its models to reason more deeply and generate research‑grade insights. The target underscores OpenAI’s push to move from task‑specific tools toward autonomous scientific discovery.