OpenAI just officially said it has reached its "automated research intern" milestone. i.e. a human-supervised system able to complete well-defined tasks that would take a skilled researcher quite few days. inside OpenAI research, agent runtime has already crossed human labor by a wide margin. 3.1-to-1 agent-to-human ratio “In terms of a standard 8 hour workday, as of mid-August, in total, the research organization uses 3.1 agent-workdays of effort for every workday of human labor.” That ratio measures agent runtime rather than equivalent productivity, but it captures how deeply parallel agent work has entered OpenAI research.