Pachocki: Researchers fail by trying to prove ideas instead of seeking truth
Jakub Pachocki · From Vibe Coding to Vibe Researching: OpenAI’s Mark Chen and Jakub Pachocki · Sep 25, 2025 · at 22:51
Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, discusses the traits of effective researchers and how to manage belief versus objective truth-seeking in AI research.
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“I think a trap many people fall into is going after the way to like, to prove that it works. Right. Which is quite different from, you know, like I think like believing in your idea and significant is extremely important, right? And you want to persist, persist that, but you have to be honest with yourself about when it's working and when it's not so that you can learn and adjust.”
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More from Jakub Pachocki
Pachocki: OpenAI's primary research target is building an automated researcher
“The big thing that we are targeting is producing an automated researcher. So automating the discovery of new ideas, the next set of evals and milestones that we're looking at will involve actual movement on things that are economically relevant.”
Pachocki: Standard AI evaluation benchmarks are close to saturation
“One thing is that indeed for like these e-files that we've been using for the last few years, they're indeed pretty close to saturated.”
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“If you look at things like Well, I guess the IMO problem six, or maybe some very hardest programming competitions problems. Like, I think there's still a little bit of headway to go for the models, but I wouldn't expect that to last very long.”
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“I haven't really bought that much into the, like, will be data constraint claim. And yeah, I don't expect that to change.”
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“But I expect that well, now as we're seeing you know, these models like actually able to automate, well, yes, like we're saying solving contest problems over, over longer time horizons. I expect that that is, well, that's, that, that was quite small compared t…”