Keep pulling the thread on Nikunj Handa & Steve Coffey.
Unify GTM used OpenAI's Computer Use model during its alpha phase to automate research for climate tech startups by having an agent open Google Maps, activate Street View, and visually check for the expansion of electric vehicle charging networks.
An OpenAI representative believes AI agents are simultaneously overhyped in general discussion but underhyped in terms of the value created by companies that successfully implement them for complex tasks like Deep Research or full workflow automation.
An OpenAI representative predicts that the most important skill for AI application builders over the next one to two years will be orchestration: the ability to rapidly integrate tools, data, and multiple LLM calls, and then quickly evaluate and improve the system.
An OpenAI representative notes that AI has not yet produced a step-change in the speed of scientific research, which was a primary hope for the O-series models.
An OpenAI representative predicts that the rate of AI model progress will be greater in the next year than it was in the last year.
In 2025, AI agent products like OpenAI's Deep Research have shifted to a multi-step "chain of thought" process, where the model can access the web, reconsider its approach, and call tools multiple times in parallel during its reasoning process.
OpenAI released the Agents SDK in response to developers already creating multi-agent systems, or "swarms," to solve specific business problems.
Extending the runtime of AI agent models like Deep Research from minutes to hours or days is expected to yield significantly more powerful results.
OpenAI is developing reinforcement fine-tuning techniques that will allow developers to create their own domain-specific tasks and graders to train models on correct tool-calling paths.
OpenAI's Computer Use models are being successfully applied in the medical domain to automate manual, multi-application workflows in legacy systems that lack APIs.
Browserbase and YC startup Scrappybara are identified as key platform players providing hosted virtual machine environments optimized for OpenAI's Computer Use models.
The Arc web browser is developing a native integration, potentially called Dia, that allows users to give an instruction in a tab, which then executes a task in the background, similar to OpenAI's Operator.