Today's guest, we are happy to invite OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu.
In April 2025, **Yao Shunyu published a famous blog post "The Second Half"**, announcing that the AI main thread game has entered the second half. After that, we had a podcast conversation with him.
Yao Shunyu graduated from Tsinghua and Princeton University, and started researching agents very early. During his PhD, he realized that language may be the closest tool to essence invented by humans, so he turned to language agent research and has been doing it for 6 years. He has many representative works.
**Our conversation starts from the individual and jointly explores the boundaries of world intelligence and the panorama of humans and machines, reached by people, organizations, AI, and human-machine interaction.**
Not long ago, I just founded a new content studio "Language is World Studio". Shunyu unexpectedly helped me answer the original intention of our studio from another perspective.
Why do we believe that language is the essential mystery of this world? His expression is: **"Language is a tool invented by humans to achieve generalization, which is more essential than other things."**
(This interview took place in May 2025. The interview represents personal views and is not related to the company where he works.)
> **02:58 Part 1: People**
> * I feel that the first 28 years of my life were very well-behaved
> * I have always had this non-consensus: I want to be an Agent
> * The biggest gain in the first year is to use GPT, not BERT; the second learning is that tasks or environment are very important
> * My research has two cores: one is how to do some valuable tasks and environments that are more relevant to the real world; the other is how to do some simple but general methods
> **17:50 Part 2: System**
> * Agent is a very old concept. Any system that can make its own decisions, interact with the environment, and try to optimize rewards can be called an Agent
> * Three ups and downs in the evolution of Agent: everyone may pay more attention to the method line and easily ignore the task line, but these two lines are complementary
> * The two most critical directions for Agent development: one is to let it have its own reward and be able to explore on its own; the other is Multi-Agent, so that they can form an organizational structure between them
> * Code is a bit like a human hand, it is AI's most important *affordance*
> * Task setting
> * Generalized tools
> * Reward mechanism
> **48:38 Part 3: Devouring Boundaries**
> * The biggest opportunity for startups is: to design different interfaces
> * It is possible that the model's capabilities will produce interaction methods beyond ChatGPT and become a Super App
> * Owning a Super App is a double-edged sword for a company. When you have a Super App like ChatGPT, naturally your research will revolve around this Super App
> * Assistant, Her, or human-like interaction is obviously one of the most important interaction methods; what is not obvious is, can I base it on non-human-like interaction?
> * This world is a relationship of mutual copying, not a one-way copying relationship
> * OpenAI may become a company similar to Google, becoming a very important part of the new world, but this does not mean that the world will be monopolized by such a unipolar system
> * The ultimate intelligent boundary is determined by different interaction methods, not by a single model
> * The winter before last, I read a book written by Von Neumann before his death: The Computer and the Brain
> * The environment is always the outermost part of the memory hierarchy, which is very philosophical
> * The Chatbot system of a model company will evolve into a very natural Agent system
> **01:05:01 Part 4: The Global of Humanity**
> * Human and System: Should Agent be like a human? "It's a utility problem"
> * OpenAI is a bottom-up company
> * If you don't have a different bet, it's hard to surpass the previous overlord
> * My mentor is the second author of GPT‑1. He stayed at OpenAI for a year, and he was a bit skeptical about this
> * If you become the CEO of Berkshire and want to allocate 50 billion US dollars to the AGI industry in the future, how would you allocate this money?
> * The real danger is not that something similar to WeChat defeats WeChat, but that something different defeats WeChat
> * It happens that in this era, it is better to do things with higher ceilings
【More Information】
Text version launched simultaneously
For the text version, please go to the official account: Language is World language is world
Original title:
115. 对OpenAI姚顺雨3小时访谈：6年Agent研究、人与系统、吞噬的边界、既单极又多元的世界
Original description:
<figure><img src="https://image.xyzcdn.net/Flo18nNUSP7OUNlTf8UgCdHxio6O.jpg" /></figure><p>今天的嘉宾，我们…
