creators

Jakub Pachocki: OpenAI Chief Scientist

Jakub Pachocki has been OpenAI's chief scientist since May 2024, after leading GPT-4 as director of research. He published "An Alien Mind" in September 2026.

Jakub Pachocki is a Polish computer scientist and the chief scientist of OpenAI, a role announced on 14 May 2024 when Ilya Sutskever left the company. Born in Gdansk in 1991, he took first place in the Polish Olympiad in Informatics in 2009, a silver medal at that year's International Olympiad in Informatics, second place overall with his University of Warsaw team at the 2012 ICPC World Finals, and the 2012 Google Code Jam title. He read computer science at the University of Warsaw and took a PhD in theoretical computer science at Carnegie Mellon University under Gary Miller. He joined OpenAI in 2017 and, as director of research, led the work on GPT-4 and OpenAI Five before taking over the research roadmap. Announcing the appointment, Sam Altman wrote that "Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation." TIME listed him among the 100 most influential people in AI in August 2025. On 6 September 2026 he published "An Alien Mind" on OpenAI's site, arguing that no lab has yet solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling frontier models at full speed.

Specialization

large language models, reasoning models, reinforcement learning, AI safety

Country

United States