Computer-use agents had to wait for language models: without pre-trained representations the reward is too sparse to ever learn from.

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla

And it just so turns out that um this was extremely early, way too early. so early that we shouldn't have been working on that, you know, uh because um if you're just stumbling your way around and keyboard mashing and mouse clicking and trying to get rewards in these environments, um your reward is too sparse and you just won't learn and you're going to burn a forest uh computing and you're never actually going to get something off the ground.