OpenThoughts: The Blueprint for Agentic SFT

Everyone talks about building better AI agents by scaling models or adding smarter tools or harnesses. But what if the real bottleneck is the training data itself? In this video, I break down OpenThoughts-Agent, a new research project that doesn’t just train an agent: it systematically engineers the best possible supervised fine-tuning dataset for long-horizon coding and terminal agents. We’ll go through how the authors ablate task sources, teacher models, rollout quality, and dataset filtering to uncover what actually makes an agent learn to act. If you want to understand where the next generation of open AI agents will come from, this pre-print is far more important than it first looks. All rights w/ authors: OPEN THOUGHTS AGENTS Data Recipes for Agentic Models Negin Raoof∗1, Richard Zhuang∗2, Marianna Nezhurina∗3,4,5, Etash Guha∗2, Atula Tejaswi6, Ryan Marten7, Charlie F. Ruan1, Tyler Griggs1, Alexander Glenn Shaw8, Hritik Bansal9, E. Kelly Buchanan2, Artem Gazizov10, Reinhard Heckel11, Chinmay Hegde12, Sankalp Jajee13, Daanish Khazi14, Emmanouil Koukoumidis15, Xiangyi Li16, Hange Liu17, Shlok Natarajan2, Harsh Raj18, Nicholas Roberts19, Ethan Shen20, Nishad Singhi21, Michael Siu22, Ashima Suvarna9, Hanwen Xing22, Patrick Yubeaton12, Robert Zhang6, Leon Liangyu Chen2, Xiaokun Chen2, Steven Dillmann2, Saadia Gabriel9, Xunyi Jiang23, Anurag Kashyap24, Boxuan Li25, Yein Park26, Minh Pham12, Sujay Sanghavi6, Lin Shi27, Ke Sun17, Yixin Wang28, Zhiwei Xu28, Erica Zhang2, Siyan Zhao9, Wanjia Zhao2, Jenia Jitsev3,4,5, Alex Dimakis1,7, Benjamin Feuer†2,15, Ludwig Schmidt†2 from 1UC Berkeley, 2Stanford University, 3JSC, 4LAION, 5Open-Ψ (Open-Sci) Collective, 6University of Texas at Austin, 7Bespoke Labs, 8Laude Institute, 9UCLA, 10Harvard University & Harvard Medical School, 11TU Munich & Munich Center for Machine Learning, 12New York University, 13Medical University of South Carolina, 14The LLM Data Company, 15Oumi.AI, 16BenchFlow, 17Independent Researcher, 18Northeastern University, 19University of Wisconsin–Madison, 20University of Washington, 21TU Darmstadt, 22University of Southern California, 23UC San Diego, 24Amazon, 25Microsoft, 26Korea University, 27Cornell Tech, 28University of Michigan #airesearch #openai #aitechnology #aiagents #aiexplained