{"id":35833,"date":"2025-07-31T21:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T21:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/35833\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T21:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T21:17:08","slug":"the-two-people-shaping-the-future-of-openais-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/35833\/","title":{"rendered":"The two people shaping the future of OpenAI\u2019s research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Chen joined the company in 2018 after working as a quantitative trader at the Wall Street firm Jane Street Capital, where he developed machine-learning models for futures trading. At OpenAI he spearheaded the creation of DALL-E, the firm\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2022\/04\/06\/1049061\/dalle-openai-gpt3-ai-agi-multimodal-image-generation\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">breakthrough generative image model<\/a>. He then worked on adding image recognition to GPT\u20114 and led the development of Codex, the generative coding model that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2023\/12\/06\/1084457\/ai-assistants-copilot-changing-code-software-development-github-openai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">powers GitHub Copilot<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Pachocki left an academic career in theoretical computer science to join OpenAI in 2017 and replaced Sutskever as chief scientist in 2024. He is the key architect of OpenAI\u2019s so-called reasoning models\u2014especially o1 and o3\u2014which are designed to tackle complex tasks in science, math, and coding.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When we met they were buzzing, fresh off the high of two new back-to-back wins for their company\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n<p>On July 16, one of OpenAI\u2019s large language models came in second in the AtCoder World Tour Finals, one of the world\u2019s most hardcore programming competitions. On July 19, OpenAI announced that one of its models had achieved gold-medal-level results on the 2025 International Math Olympiad, one of the world\u2019s most prestigious math contests.<\/p>\n<p>The math result made headlines, not only because of OpenAI\u2019s remarkable achievement, but because rival Google DeepMind revealed two days later that one of its models had achieved the same score in the same competition. Google DeepMind had played by the competition\u2019s rules and waited for its results to be checked by the organizers before making an announcement; OpenAI had in effect marked its own answers.<\/p>\n<p>For Chen and Pachocki, the result speaks for itself. Anyway, it\u2019s the programming win they\u2019re most excited about. \u201cI think that\u2019s quite underrated,\u201d Chen told me. A gold medal result in the International Math Olympiad puts you somewhere in the top 20 to 50 competitors, he said. But in the AtCoder contest OpenAI\u2019s model placed in the top two: \u201cTo break into a really different tier of human performance\u2014that\u2019s unprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>  Ship, ship, ship!  <\/p>\n<p>People at OpenAI still like to say they work at a research lab. But the company is very different from the one it was before the release of ChatGPT three years ago. The firm is now in a race with the biggest and richest technology companies in the world and valued at $300 billion. Envelope-pushing research and eye-catching demos no longer cut it. It needs to ship products and get them into people\u2019s hands\u2014and boy, it does.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI has kept up a run of new releases\u2014putting out major updates to its GPT-4 series, launching a string of generative image and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2024\/02\/15\/1088401\/openai-amazing-new-generative-ai-video-model-sora\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">video models<\/a>, and introducing the ability to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2023\/09\/25\/1080196\/now-you-can-chat-with-chatgpt-using-your-voice\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">talk to ChatGPT with your voice<\/a>. Six months ago it kicked off a new wave of so-called reasoning models with its o1 release, soon followed by o3. And last week it released its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2025\/01\/23\/1110484\/openai-launches-operator-an-agent-that-can-use-a-computer-for-you\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">browser-using agent Operator<\/a> to the public. It now claims that more than 400 million people use its products every week and submit 2.5 billion prompts a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chen joined the company in 2018 after working as a quantitative trader at the Wall Street firm Jane&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-35833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}