OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge. The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. OpenAI says that this new research goal will be its "North Star" for the next few years, pulling together multiple research strands, including work on reasoning models, agents, and interpretability .

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed both the construction and application of information retrieval (IR) systems. However, current interactions between IR systems and LLMs remain limited, with LLMs merely serving as part of components within IR systems, and IR systems being constructed independently of LLMs. This separated architecture restricts knowledge sharing and deep collaboration between them. In this paper, we introduce Self-Retrieval, a novel end-to-end LLM-driven information retrieval architecture.

This month we tackle the topic of young people and what AI tools mean for their future. Joining the conversation this time are: Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Michael Littman (Brown University), and Ella Scallan (AIhub). As AI tools have become ubiquitous, we've seen growing concern and increasing coverage about how the use of such tools from a formative age might affect children. What do you think the impact will be and what skills might young people need to navigate this AI world? I met up with a bunch of high school friends when I was last in Switzerland and they were all wondering what their kids should study. They were wondering if they should do social science, seeing as AI tools have become adept at many tasks, such as coding, writing, art, etc. I think that we need social sciences, but that we also need people who know the technology and who can continue developing it. I say they should continue doing whatever they're interested in and those jobs will evolve and they'll look different, but there will still be a whole wealth of different types of jobs.

The malleable mind: context accumulation drives LLM's belief drift After being trained on a dataset of 80,000 words of conservative political philosophy, Grok-4 changed the stance of its outputs on political questions more than a quarter of the time. This was without any adversarial prompts - the change in training data was enough. As memory mechanisms and research agents [1, 2] enable LLMs to accumulate context across long horizons, earlier prompts increasingly shape later responses. In human decision-making, such repeated exposure influences beliefs without deliberate persuasion [3]. When an LLM operates over accumulated context, does this past exposure cause the stance of the LLM's responses to drift over time?

Ta s k: Your task is to boil tin.

In this paper, we present DSA, the first automated framework for discovering sparsity allocation schemes for layer-wise pruning in Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs have become increasingly powerful, but their large parameter counts make them computationally expensive. Existing pruning methods for compressing LLMs primarily focus on evaluating redundancies and removing element-wise weights. However, these methods fail to allocate adaptive layerwise sparsities, leading to performance degradation in challenging tasks.