Rumors I’ve been hearing. I’ll start with OpenAI, then Anthropic.
OpenAI: The internal model’s reasoning jump comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Strategies learned there transfer to research mathematics and other fields. Navier–Stokes and ETH show the scale of the improvement. The clue is in the Synthetic RL hiring: self-play, simulators, and synthetic feedback.
Anthropic: Same direction with its internal Claude model. It’s trained on long, difficult tasks in demanding environments, and the reasoning skills transfer to other fields. Its ETH result shows how far the improvement has gone. The earlier Universes listing and the RL hiring around mathematical reasoning align with that.
Musk’s Digital Optimus hiring explicitly calls for measuring transfer from games into general computer use. That’s why his game-playing AI push matters: games develop abilities that work far beyond the games themselves.
The interesting part is where those abilities show up. Each lab’s internal model applies reasoning developed through interactive training to mathematical problems that had resisted decades of work.