Chen: OpenAI favors unifying modalities in as few architectures as possible
Mark Chen · Cooking with OpenAI’s Research Chief: AGI, o1, Evals, and Scaling Laws — Mark Chen · Jun 25, 2026 · at 31:58
Mark Chen is Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, speaking with host Alan about multimodal model architectures and infrastructure maintenance costs.
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“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 something that you shouldn't underestimate. So I think there are a lot of benefits to just, like, you know, you do some core research in, in your, like, in your fundamental stack, and that just carries over to whatever modality or whatever thing you want. So I think there's a strong bias for us to keep it in as few different architectures as possible.”
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