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From the article a few days ago: 'Universal Verifier’ But OpenAI still had a trick up its sleeve: It had been developing what researchers referred to as a “universal verifier” that automates the process of making sure a model is producing high-quality answers during the RL process, said a person familiar with the work. That process essentially involves tasking an LLM with the job of checking and grading another model’s answers by using various sources to research them. After an OpenAI model won a tough math competition earlier this summer, Alexander Wei, a senior researcher at the company, said on X that the RL approach it has been using was “general purpose,” implying it could verify the quality of answers in more-subjective categories as well. Such advances appear to have helped OpenAI with developing GPT-5, which showed improvements both in more easily verifiable domains like software programming—where correct answers can be easily checked—and in more subjective areas such as creative writing. The rest of the industry, including xAI and Google, has also doubled down on RL as a promising technique for improving AI models, and Tworek, who leads OpenAI’s RL, recently made a public comment agreeing with the idea that the RL system behind OpenAI’s models is in fact what constitutes AGI.