Mark Chen

“Oh, you know, it's absolutely a true story. And I have brought soup to our own researchers.”

“RLs traditionally had headwinds when it's come to fields that, you know, it's more kind of, Subjective than objective. So if you kind of think of, you know, one kind of, you know example of this is creative writing, where, you know, you could take two pieces o…”

“The initial direction we took was you should move it to real world research, right? And we've seen that the models, they've gotten a lot better at just kind of discovering novel theorems and pushing the frontiers of hard sciences. Even today, right, that's no …”

“So I think beyond that, the other scary thing in the field is the number of canonical gold standard benchmarks is low. And we really are kind of in an evals crisis, right? Where all the really great evals that we all know, like growing up, like taking the SAT …”

“Yeah, I think there's a kind of interesting philosophy of separate the teams that are creating the evals from the teams that are optimizing the models themselves, because that way you don't, like, co-incentivize them, right? Like, the way the evals theme can w…”

“Many, many coding products today have features like compaction, right? Where you can compress kind of either insights or working state and stuff like that, you know, it just shortcuts a lot of the very brutally difficult and expensive permit is that you have t…”

“Well, I think if you still have a pre-training is dead view of the world I think pre-training is definitely yeah, yeah, not, not dead. It's underrated.”

“Because, like, you're sitting down with Mark Chen, the chief research officer of OpenAI, talking about, like, the roadmap and the future models that they're working on.”

“Just looking purely at the benchmarks, you know, we actually felt quite confident you know, we have models internally that perform at the level of Gemini three, and we're pretty confident that we will release them soon, and we can release successor models that…”

“So we think the future is about reasoning, more and more about reasoning, more and more about agents.”

“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…”

“Like when I look at my direct reports they haven't been affected by the talent wars.”

“I think the danger is you end up like second place at everything and, you know, not like, you know, clearly leading at anything. So I think prioritization is important, right? And you need to make sure there's some things you're clear eyed on. This is the thin…”

“There's no one who's like, ah, you know, I have all the compute that I need.”

“I think, you know any of these rank lists, like he should be number one. Like just his ability to, you know, take any very difficult technical challenge and almost like personally just kind of think about it for two weeks and just crush it.”

“Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, we've been more proactive than ever before. We're recalibrating comp and we're scooping out creative wa…”

“When you look at reasoning you just don't see that happen at small scale, right? There's like a certain scale at which it starts becoming signal bearing and that requires you to have resources, right?”

“And I think the reason why we care so much about reasoning is because I think that's the path that we get reliable agents through.”

“I think, like, if you find the right levers, you can really pump a lot of compute into RL as well as pre-training.”