creators

Alec Radford: GPT and CLIP author, independent

Alec Radford wrote the first GPT papers and CLIP at OpenAI. He now works independently, advises Thinking Machines Lab and released the Talkie 1930 model.

Alec Radford, born in April 1993 and raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, dropped out of Olin College in August 2014 after co-founding the startup Indico, where he worked on early generative adversarial networks for image generation. He joined OpenAI around 2016, in his early twenties and without a graduate degree, and became one of its most cited researchers. At OpenAI he was first author on the 2018 "Generative Pre-Training" paper and on GPT-2, the line of work behind the GPT models that power ChatGPT. He was also first author of CLIP and of Whisper, and a co-author of DALL-E, GPT-3, GPT-4, OpenAI's scaling-laws papers and the first two papers on reinforcement learning from human feedback. He left OpenAI in December 2024 to work independently, and around March 2025 joined Thinking Machines Lab, the company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, as an adviser, alongside former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew. Google Scholar still lists his affiliation as independent. In April 2026 he released Talkie with Nick Levine and David Duvenaud: a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on 260 billion tokens of English text published before 1931, built to see what a model that knows nothing after that date says about the present.

Specialization

large language models, self-supervised learning, multimodal models, speech recognition

Country

United States