Thinking in tokens and token efficiency

From pre-training data curation to shipping GPT-4o, o1, o3, and now GPT-5 thinking and the shopping model, Josh McGrath has lived through the full arc of OpenAI's post-training evolution—from the PPO vs DPO debates of 2023 to today's RLVR era, where the real innovation isn't optimization methods but data quality, signal trust, and token efficiency. We sat down with Josh at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the state of post-training heading into 2026: why RLHF and RLVR are both just policy gradient methods (the difference is the input data, not the math), how GRPO from DeepSeek Math was underappreciated as a shift toward more trustworthy reward signals (math answers you can verify vs. human preference you can't), why token efficiency matters more than wall-clock time (GPT-5 to 5.1 bumped evals and slashed tokens), how Codex has changed his workflow so much he feels "trapped" by 40-minute design sessions followed by 15-minute agent sprints, the infrastructure chaos of scaling RL ("way more moving parts than pre-training"), why long context will keep climbing but agents + graph walks might matter more than 10M-token windows, the shopping model as a test bed for interruptability and chain-of-thought transparency, why personality toggles (Anton vs Clippy) are a real differentiator users care about, and his thesis that the education system isn't producing enough people who can do both distributed systems and ML research—the exact skill set required to push the frontier when the bottleneck moves every few weeks.

We discuss:

• Josh's path: pre-training data curation → post-training researcher at OpenAI, shipping GPT-4o, o1, o3, GPT-5 thinking, and the shopping model

• Why he switched from pre-training to post-training: "Do I want to make 3% compute efficiency wins, or change behavior by 40%?"

• The RL infrastructure challenge: way more moving parts than pre-training (tasks, grading setups, external partners), and why babysitting runs at 12:30am means jumping into unfamiliar code constantly

• How Codex has changed his workflow: 40-minute design sessions compressed into 15-minute agent sprints, and the strange "trapped" feeling of waiting for the agent to finish

• The RLHF vs RLVR debate: both are policy gradient methods, the real difference is data quality and signal trust (human preference vs. verifiable correctness)

• Why GRPO (from DeepSeek Math) was underappreciated: not just an optimization trick, but a shift toward reward signals you can actually trust (math answers over human vibes)

• The token efficiency revolution: GPT-5 to 5.1 bumped evals and slashed tokens, and why thinking in tokens (not wall-clock time) unlocks better tool-calling and agent workflows

• Personality toggles: Anton (tool, no warmth) vs Clippy (friendly, helpful), and why Josh uses custom instructions to make his model "just a tool"

• The router problem: having a router at the top (GPT-5 thinking vs non-thinking) and an implicit router (thinking effort slider) creates weird bumps, and why the abstractions will eventually merge

• Long context: climbing Graph Blocks evals, the dream of 10M+ token windows, and why agents + graph walks might matter more than raw context length

• Why the education system isn't producing enough people who can do both distributed systems and ML research, and why that's the bottleneck for frontier labs

• The 2026 vision: neither pre-training nor post-training is dead, we're in the fog of war, and the bottleneck will keep moving (so emotional stability helps)

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Josh McGrath

• OpenAI: https://openai.com

• https://x.com/j_mcgraph

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction: Josh McGrath on Post-Training at OpenAI
• 00:04:37 The Shopping Model: Black Friday Launch and Interruptability
• 00:07:11 Model Personality and the Anton vs Clippy Divide
• 00:08:26 Beyond PPO vs DPO: The Data Quality Spectrum in RL
• 00:01:40 Infrastructure Challenges: Why Post-Training RL is Harder Than Pre-Training
• 00:13:12 Token Efficiency: The 2D Plot That Matters Most
• 00:03:45 Codex Max and the Flow Problem: 40 Minutes of Planning, 15 Minutes of Waiting
• 00:17:29 Long Context and Graph Blocks: Climbing Toward Perfect Context
• 00:21:23 The ML-Systems Hybrid: What's Hard to Hire For
• 00:24:50 Pre-Training Isn't Dead: Living Through Technological Revolution