creators

Mark Chen: OpenAI Chief Research Officer

Mark Chen is OpenAI's Chief Research Officer. He led the DALL-E and Codex teams, added vision to GPT-4, and co-leads research with Jakub Pachocki.

Mark Chen graduated from MIT in the class of 2012 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics with computer science. He worked as a quantitative trader at several proprietary trading firms, among them Jane Street Capital, building machine learning algorithms for equities and futures trading, before joining OpenAI in 2018. At OpenAI he led the team that created DALL-E, the text-to-image model, and led the development of Codex, the code-generation model behind GitHub Copilot. He also led the team that added visual perception to GPT-4, and now leads OpenAI's effort to build models capable of more complex reasoning — the chain-of-thought approach the company first demonstrated with its o1 release in 2024 — and models to underpin agents that work autonomously for long periods. He coaches the United States team for the International Olympiad in Informatics. OpenAI made him Chief Research Officer on 24 March 2025, to drive scientific progress and tie research more closely to product. He co-leads research with Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, who sets the long-term roadmap while Chen shapes and manages the teams. MIT Technology Review named him to its 2025 Innovators Under 35 list, and in July 2026 he told reporters in Seoul that AI would produce award-worthy discoveries within two years.

Specialization

large language models, multimodal models, reasoning models, code generation

Country

United States