Navigating Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure

This week on No Priors, Elad and Sarah sit down with Eric Mitchell and Brandon McKinzie, two of the minds behind OpenAI’s O3 model. They discuss what makes O3 unique, including its focus on reasoning, the role of reinforcement learning, and how tool use enables more powerful interactions. The conversation explores the unification of model capabilities, what the next generation of human-AI interfaces could look like, and how models will continue to advance in the years ahead.

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Show Notes:

0:00 What is o3?

3:21 Reinforcement learning in o3

4:44 Unification of models

8:56 Why tool use helps test time scaling

11:10 Deep research

16:00 Future ways to interact with models

22:03 General purpose vs specialized models

25:30 Simulating AI interacting with the world

29:36 How will models advance?