How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek
How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek  
Podcast: The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
Published On: Thu Oct 16 2025
Description: What does it really mean when GPT-5 “thinks”? In this conversation, OpenAI’s VP of Research Jerry Tworek explains how modern reasoning models work in practice—why pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF) are both essential, what that on-screen “thinking” actually does, and when extra test-time compute helps (or doesn’t). We trace the evolution from O1 (a tech demo good at puzzles) to O3 (the tool-use shift) to GPT-5 (Jerry calls it “03.1-ish”), and talk through verifiers, reward design, and the real trade-offs behind “auto” reasoning modes.We also go inside OpenAI: how research is organized, why collaboration is unusually transparent, and how the company ships fast without losing rigor. Jerry shares the backstory on competitive-programming results like ICPC, what they signal (and what they don’t), and where agents and tool use are genuinely useful today. Finally, we zoom out: could pretraining + RL be the path to AGI? This is the MAD Podcast —AI for the 99%. If you’re curious about how these systems actually work (without needing a PhD), this episode is your map to the current AI frontier.OpenAIWebsite - https://openai.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/OpenAIJerry TworekLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-tworek-b5b9aa56X/Twitter - https://x.com/millionintFIRSTMARKWebsite - https://firstmark.comX/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCapMatt Turck (Managing Director)LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck(00:00) Intro(01:01) What Reasoning Actually Means in AI(02:32) Chain of Thought: Models Thinking in Words(05:25) How Models Decide Thinking Time(07:24) Evolution from O1 to O3 to GPT-5(11:00) Before OpenAI: Growing up in Poland, Dropping out of School, Trading(20:32) Working on Robotics and Rubik's Cube Solving(23:02) A Day in the Life: Talking to Researchers(24:06) How Research Priorities Are Determined(26:53) Collaboration vs IP Protection at OpenAI(29:32) Shipping Fast While Doing Deep Research(31:52) Using OpenAI's Own Tools Daily(32:43) Pre-Training Plus RL: The Modern AI Stack(35:10) Reinforcement Learning 101: Training Dogs(40:17) The Evolution of Deep Reinforcement Learning(42:09) When GPT-4 Seemed Underwhelming at First(45:39) How RLHF Made GPT-4 Actually Useful(48:02) Unsupervised vs Supervised Learning(49:59) GRPO and How DeepSeek Accelerated US Research(53:05) What It Takes to Scale Reinforcement Learning(55:36) Agentic AI and Long-Horizon Thinking(59:19) Alignment as an RL Problem(1:01:11) Winning ICPC World Finals Without Specific Training(1:05:53) Applying RL Beyond Math and Coding(1:09:15) The Path from Here to AGI(1:12:23) Pure RL vs Language Models