Mark Chen: A PhD is not necessary to excel in AI research
Mark Chen · Cooking with OpenAI’s Research Chief: AGI, o1, Evals, and Scaling Laws — Mark Chen · Jun 25, 2026 · at 2:14
Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, discusses hiring candidates from non-traditional backgrounds such as trading and physics.
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“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 of the box. It's not so much, you know, you have to do a PhD, even though that does bring a valuable skill set.”
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