Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer, OpenAI · 1 appearance on the record.
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executivescientistengineer@markchen90 ↗openai.com ↗
Mark Chen is the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI. He previously worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street Capital and has led research teams behind DALL-E, Codex, and GPT-4.
16statements → 4claims → 0claims resolved → 3.94/5average certainty → 2.38/5average debate potential → 4said about them ↓
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1 prediction · 3 assertions · 3 opinions · 5 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Mark Chen said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Chen: OpenAI's three-year goal is models conducting end-to-end research
“When we look at our kind of three-year roadmap, right the end goal that we want to reach is one where You know, the models are just doing end-to-end research, and I think a part of that problem is just being able to have the model come up with good taste.”
Chen: Meta poaching has calmed down and OpenAI came out on top
“I think that met us calmed down a little bit. I think we came out on top”
Mark Chen: AI models are producing 'Move 37' breakthroughs in math and coding
“There's move-thirty-sevens in, in math. There's in computer science and coding. I think even, yeah, just, it feels like a lot of people woke up at the start of this year and were like, man, agents are working in my profession. And you know, they're essentially…”
OpenAI's Chen: AI models already discover novel theorems and advance sciences
“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 …”
Mark Chen: AI scaling laws will continue to hold
“And so I think it's just more and more of the same, right? Like more careful research engineering, more careful data engineering, more careful scaling, and it always unlocks that next ability to scale further. So I mean, it's held for You know, almost 10 order…”
Chen: OpenAI favors unifying modalities in as few architectures as possible
“For a research lab, I think there are a lot of advantages for it to being under one. So you just have to maintain one infrastructure stack, for instance. I think the cost to, like, maintaining and scaling many infrastructure stacks at once I think that's somet…”
Chen: Pre-training is not dead and remains underrated in AI research
“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.”
Mark Chen: A PhD is not necessary to excel in AI research
“There are a lot of researchers who just started out without formal training in machine learning or AI research. We've very much believed in training people up to do this. I think the real hard thing is the ability to creatively solve problems and think outside…”
Jakob Pachocki and Ilya Sutskever overcame internal inertia to build OpenAI o1
“Even at a company like OpenAI, you would have people ask naturally, why do something when you have a machine that works? And fundamentally, you know, it's to the credit of, you know, Jakob, Ilya, many of the people who really had conviction and vision in this …”
OpenAI's Mark Chen: AI is in an evals crisis with saturated benchmarks
“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 …”
Chen: Eval teams and model optimization teams must remain separate
“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…”
Mark Chen: Paper replication is the best way to develop AI research taste
“The best mechanism I've found for developing that is really just replication. So I think you should take papers that you really look up to, and just try to fully replicate it.”
OpenAI's Chen: Reinforcement learning struggles in subjective, hard-to-grade fields
“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…”
Chen: Compaction shortcuts expensive native long context in coding products
“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…”
Mark Chen brought soup to researchers to counter Zuckerberg's talent poaching
“Oh, you know, it's absolutely a true story. And I have brought soup to our own researchers.”
OpenAI's three research pillars are pre-training, RL, and alignment
“At the very highest level, right, we have an org that focuses on pre-training, right, which is, you know, giving models a lot of world knowledge. We focus on RL, like, teaching the models how to reason with that knowledge, how to chain the little insights toge…”
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Cooking with OpenAI’s Research Chief: AGI, o1, Evals, and Scaling Laws — Mark Chen | Jun 25, 2026 | 22m |