“Right now, we have paced the frontier most recently by actually holding back our most powerful model, partially because we want to make sure the safety and alignment is at a place where our researchers have a time to really think it through. That model is the model that solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Math problem.”
Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Asked how OpenAI makes room for big-picture thinking, Friar described "pacing the frontier." She said the company is holding back its strongest model on safety and alignment grounds, and gave her own account of what it has achieved. She tied the fluid-dynamics result to more efficient data center cooling and less water use.
Transcript
…way to get those vulnerabilities fixed before the offense discovers them. And so happy to announce today that we've done that work. Is the work done? Definitely not. Is the bar going to keep getting raised? Absolutely. But yeah, the age of AI. I mean, I'm grateful to be alive. Yeah, what a time
…to think about the big questions, to make the space for that. So how do you do that? How does OpenAI do that, given that the questions here are like the invention of electricity, the invention of the printing press? So how do you make that space for these kind of important, very big thoughts?
Yeah, and happening at the printing press or electricity happened a little bit at a much slower pace. Although I bet if you lived then, you thought it was an incredible pace, by the way. To make the space, I mean, we've used a phrase called pacing the frontier. And pacing the frontier is really about, as we think about safety and alignment, giving our researchers and our whole company and the world to some degree time to digest, like what are the implications. So right now, we have paced the frontier most recently by actually holding back our most powerful model, partially because we want to make sure it's the safety and alignment is at a place where our researchers have a time to really think it through. That model is the model that solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Math problem and also about 350 more theorems have certainly moved along from a theoretical proof perspective. What I think a lot about internally, where I try to make the space is theories are great and we need to work closely with the scientific community on that. But what does it actually mean in practice? Like, you know, I was a…
Yeah. Well, one of the key things is trust, because trust in all institutions is at an all-time low, right? I mean, it's actually disastrous for society. It's disastrous for us functioning. And obviously it makes business itself difficult. But given AI and given the problem is, is that most people…
Yeah. So first of all, trust is earned. It doesn't just fall down on you like manna from heaven. It is earned. So it takes time and it's grindy because, you know, I always call it you're filling the bucket because we all, things will happen where you take, I always tell my kids, like you'll take…
You're in trouble.
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