Chen: Competitive coding and math benchmarks predict future research success
Mark Chen · From Vibe Coding to Vibe Researching: OpenAI’s Mark Chen and Jakub Pachocki · Sep 25, 2025 · at 4:43
Mark Chen is Chief Research Officer at OpenAI. He explains why high performance in competitions like IOI, AtCoder, and IMO correlates with frontier AI research capabilities.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I mean, I think it is important to note that these evals like you know, IOI, AtCoder, IMO are actually real world markers for success in future research.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mark Chen
Chen: GPT-5 Pro automates tasks that take physics students months
“And you know, we see physicists, mathematicians kind of repeating this experience over and over where they're trying GPT-Five Pro and saying, wow, this is something that the, you know, previous version of the models couldn't do. And it is a little bit of a lig…”
Chen: The future of scientific discovery will be 'vibe researching'
“I do think, you know, the future hopefully will be vibe researching.”
Chen: The future of AI will center on reasoning and agents
“So we think the future is about reasoning, more and more about reasoning, more and more about agents.”
Chen: Reasoning provides essential robustness for long-horizon AI agents
“Reasoning is core to this ability to operate over a long horizon, because, you know, you imagine kind of yourself solving a math problem, where you try an approach, it doesn't work, and, you know, you have to think about, you know, what, what's the next approa…”
Chen: Earlier Codex models spent too little time on hard problems
“What we found is the latest, the previous generation of the codex models, they were spending too little time solving the hardest problems and too much time solving the easy, easy problems. And I think that, that is actually just probably out of the box what yo…”