Noam Brown, the research lead for AI reasoning at OpenAI, stated at Nvidia’s GTC conference that advanced AI reasoning models could have been developed much earlier if the right approaches were known. He emphasized the importance of 'thinking' before acting in AI, a technique employed by OpenAI's o1 model. Brown noted that while pre-training remains important, there's a shift towards combining it with test-time inference for enhanced accuracy. He also highlighted the potential for academic contributions in AI benchmarking, despite limited computational resources in academia amid recent funding cuts.