How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek

The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck · Oct 16, 2025 · 1h 16m

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…