Oaktree Capital Memo Analyzes AI's Accelerating Trajectory, Highlights GPT-5.3 Codex Self-Improvement Milestone

Summary

Oaktree Capital Management, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, published a major investor memo examining the accelerating pace of AI capability. The memo highlights OpenAI's February 5, 2026 release of GPT-5.3 Codex as a watershed moment, noting that OpenAI's technical documentation explicitly stated the model was 'instrumental in creating itself' — used by the Codex team to debug its own training, manage deployment, and diagnose evaluations. Oaktree frames this as a qualitat