[State of RL/Reasoning] IMO/IOI Gold, OpenAI o3/GPT-5, and Cursor Composer — Ashvin Nair, Cursor

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Okay, we're here at NeurIPS, we're recording a special Latent Space coverage of the folks at NeurIPS, and we're here with Ashvin from Cursor, welcome.

**Ashvin Nair** (0:08)
Hi, yeah, thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:09)
So, I guess the, like, Ashvin from Cursor is like a new identity. I didn't even know if I should say that, because you only joined Cursor for three months. Before that, you were opening AI work in 0103, before that, Berkeley, PhD in RL, just, but focused on robotics.

**Ashvin Nair** (0:24)
Robotics, yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:25)
Is it weird searching for robotics in language models?

**Ashvin Nair** (0:28)
This is kind of interesting because a lot of people have been kind of doing this.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
I mean, opening AI.

**Ashvin Nair** (0:32)
Yeah, I got a robot. So, actually, I actually was at OpenAI in 2017 also. Where is it, on robotics? Yeah, I was interning, like, right before my PhD, where I worked on robotics there.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
2017, is that like, Japan? And that is Japan over there? He was all famously opening as first intern.

**Ashvin Nair** (0:49)
Oh, really? Okay. Then he might have been before. But yeah, there was like 15 interns. It was a very different company. It was just like robotics, Dota and like 15 interns that summer, all having like pretty exciting individual projects. Like, yeah, that set of interns, if you look over there now, it's kind of cool. Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:06)
But yeah, anyone from that class that like you would shout out?

**Ashvin Nair** (1:10)
Like, there's just like a lot of cool papers that came out, like Lowe, Pinto, and now is at NYU.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:18)
Yeah, and Favrement.

**Ashvin Nair** (1:19)
The person who leads Reasoning at XAI, I forgot his name. Eric?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:23)
Well, he left.

**Ashvin Nair** (1:24)
No, Eric. Yeah, I forgot his name, but he worked on like KFAC and stuff. I think.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:29)
Yeah, the decision dude, Greg?

**Ashvin Nair** (1:31)
Not Greg, but yeah. But yeah, it was like an exciting time to be there. But yeah, I think robotics is a pretty good fit for LLMs because like this switch ends up being pretty, like you kind of do similar things, like you want to look at a lot of data. It's like kind of hard to get stuff working in robotics world. I think it kind of builds like very greedy people who like look at data a lot, that kind of thing. So yeah, for whatever reason, I think that transfer is like, yeah, it's happening a lot and I think it makes a lot of sense.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:02)
One of my NeurIPS highlights so far, I had dinner with, it's like a small group dinner with Lex Fridman yesterday, and Lex used to be in robotics. And he was like, my assessment of robotics people, robotics people are the best to talk to at NeurIPS because they're most grounded, he says, because they don't have a choice. They work with the real world, so they look at data. And then the most unhinged, the most detached from reality are like the simulation people.

**Ashvin Nair** (2:27)
I see. Yeah, I think I agree. Yeah, and I actually did a little bit of both during my PhD. I work in prototype ideas in SIM and then get them working on real world robotics. And yeah, I mean, probably robotics is where you kind of feel AGI at the least, because it's just so far away from working. Now, I think over the last year, maybe, there's been demos that have been super interesting from like physical intelligence and like Sunday and stuff that... Yeah, I'm starting to be like, okay, like this kind of thing.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:56)
Sunday robots themselves?

**Ashvin Nair** (2:58)
I haven't seen them.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:59)
Apparently, they've been doing demos. I mean, I'm pretty keen to see them.

**Ashvin Nair** (3:01)
Yeah, I've seen the physical intelligence ones live. And yeah, it's pretty impressive, like just on like in someone's living room folding laundry and stuff. Like, you know, you can just toss it in there.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
Artful buddy must be materialized. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, and Nathan, last thing on robotics, and we can kind of pivot to O103. Just, OpenAI has like, it's like restarting a robotics team. Is that serious? Is that...

**Ashvin Nair** (3:27)
I actually know very little about it, because yeah, I was in like a pretty different far as the org. So yeah, I mean, I think it's serious. I think there's a ton of excitement around robotics right now. I'm actually kind of curious what drives it, because I don't think I fully understand, you know, like there's been like crazy raises and stuff recently, right?