In 2025, Sam Altman announced a target for OpenAI engineers to develop an ‘automated research intern’. A year later, the company released a comprehensive update detailing progress on this initiative. This development highlights OpenAI’s ongoing commitment to integrating advanced AI capabilities into research processes.
In a long update released, the AI Lab detailed how autonomous programming tools are overhauling its day-to-day laboratory operations.
Roughly a year after CEO Sam Altman instructed OpenAI engineering teams to design an “automated research intern,” the artificial intelligence (AI) company has announced that it has successfully fulfilled that objective, while setting its sights on engineering a fully independent AI scientist by March 2028.
Daily help requests submitted to an internal IT support desk run by human technicians have plunged by more than 50% since January, as staff increasingly rely on autonomous bots to resolve software problems.
Rather than drafting routine scripts manually, staff members are handing off complex duties to automated assistants, leading to higher experimentation volume, faster software releases and a shift toward supervising AI-generated code, according to the long note. It also said that the technology has also taken over corporate troubleshooting.