Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Sam Altman pinpointed GPT-4 as the moment OpenAI gained significant conviction, particularly when they saw the model was smart enough to enable progress in reasoning. He believes that achieving robust reasoning capabilities will lead to the development of agents capable of performing valuable economic work.
“I would say we got real conviction with GPT-4. Not even 3.5.”
“What was it? It was seeing the model was smart enough that we knew we'd be able to figure out and approach that works for reasoning.”
“And then a belief that if we got reasoning to work, that would bring about what is not called agents, though we called it different things at the time, but the ability to go do hugely valuable pieces of economic work and make people's lives easier in a lot of ways that we still haven't seen.”