An exclusive conversation with OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, about his firm's new grand challenge and the future of AI.March 20, 2026Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Library of Congress, Wellcome Collection OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge. The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. ​​OpenAI says that this new research goal will be its “North Star” for the next few years, pulling together multiple research strands, including work on reasoning models, agents, and interpretability. There’s even a timeline. OpenAI plans to build “an autonomous AI research intern”—a system that can take on a small number of specific research problems by itself—by September. The AI intern will be the precursor to a fully automated multi-agent research system that the company plans to debut in 2028. This AI researcher (OpenAI says) will be able to tackle problems that are too large or complex for humans to cope with. Those tasks might be related to math and physics—such as coming up with new proofs or conjectures—or life sciences like biology and chemistry, or even business and policy dilemmas. In theory, you would throw such a tool any kind of problem that can be formulated in text, code, or whiteboard scribbles—which covers a lot. OpenAI has been setting the agenda for the AI industry for years. Its early dominance with large language models shaped the technology that hundreds of millions of people use every day. But it now faces fierce competition from rival model makers like Anthropic and Google DeepMind. What OpenAI decides to build next matters—for itself and for the future of AI.