The two people shaping the future of OpenAI’s research

Chen joined the company in 2018 after working as a quantitative trader at the Wall Street firm Jane Street Capital, where he developed machine-learning models for futures trading. At OpenAI he spearheaded the creation of DALL-E, the firm’s breakthrough generative image model. He then worked on adding image recognition to GPT‑4 and led the development of Codex, the generative coding model that powers GitHub Copilot.

Pachocki left an academic career in theoretical computer science to join OpenAI in 2017 and replaced Sutskever as chief scientist in 2024. He is the key architect of OpenAI’s so-called reasoning models—especially o1 and o3—which are designed to tackle complex tasks in science, math, and coding. 

When we met they were buzzing, fresh off the high of two new back-to-back wins for their company’s technology.

On July 16, one of OpenAI’s large language models came in second in the AtCoder World Tour Finals, one of the world’s most hardcore programming competitions. On July 19, OpenAI announced that one of its models had achieved gold-medal-level results on the 2025 International Math Olympiad, one of the world’s most prestigious math contests.

The math result made headlines, not only because of OpenAI’s remarkable achievement, but because rival Google DeepMind revealed two days later that one of its models had achieved the same score in the same competition. Google DeepMind had played by the competition’s rules and waited for its results to be checked by the organizers before making an announcement; OpenAI had in effect marked its own answers.

For Chen and Pachocki, the result speaks for itself. Anyway, it’s the programming win they’re most excited about. “I think that’s quite underrated,” Chen told me. A gold medal result in the International Math Olympiad puts you somewhere in the top 20 to 50 competitors, he said. But in the AtCoder contest OpenAI’s model placed in the top two: “To break into a really different tier of human performance—that’s unprecedented.”

Ship, ship, ship!

People at OpenAI still like to say they work at a research lab. But the company is very different from the one it was before the release of ChatGPT three years ago. The firm is now in a race with the biggest and richest technology companies in the world and valued at $300 billion. Envelope-pushing research and eye-catching demos no longer cut it. It needs to ship products and get them into people’s hands—and boy, it does. 

OpenAI has kept up a run of new releases—putting out major updates to its GPT-4 series, launching a string of generative image and video models, and introducing the ability to talk to ChatGPT with your voice. Six months ago it kicked off a new wave of so-called reasoning models with its o1 release, soon followed by o3. And last week it released its browser-using agent Operator to the public. It now claims that more than 400 million people use its products every week and submit 2.5 billion prompts a day.