OpenAI roadmap revealed: AI research interns by 2026, full-blown AGI researchers by 2028 (www.techradar.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a bold roadmap saying the company expects its models to function like “AI research interns” by 2026 and aims for a “true automated AI researcher” by March 2028. Altman framed this as a gradual transition toward a more “personal AGI” — systems that don’t just answer prompts but actively read papers, compare literature, propose next steps, design and run small experiments, and present results. He avoided a strict AGI definition, calling it a multi-year process of increasing autonomy rather than a single tipping point. For the AI/ML community this signals a shift from conversational assistants to collaborative research agents, with big upside and hard technical demands. Potential benefits include accelerating literature reviews, hypothesis generation, experiment orchestration and reproducibility. But delivering reliable research agents requires major progress on hallucination elimination, provenance/citation, verifiable outputs (show-your-work), robust benchmark suites, safe experiment automation, and governance over autonomy. The timeline underscores urgent priorities for alignment, evaluation protocols, tooling for reproducibility and verification, and policy frameworks — because an agent that confidently errs is far more dangerous than a passive chatbot. If realized, these systems will reshape workflows and research practices, but quality, safety, and control will matter far more than calendar targets.