OpenAI's chief scientist says AI progress has been "surprisingly slow" and promises big leaps ahead

At the GPT-5.5 launch, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said AI progress has recently been slower than expected.

He predicted major capability gains are coming soon, likely driven by better reasoning and more inference-time compute.

Greg Brockman said GPT-5.5 is strong at practical tasks and could serve as a base for future reasoning systems.

The comments underscore OpenAI’s view that progress will accelerate, while some researchers still question the current large-language-model paradigm.