Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer, OpenAI
Before joining OpenAI, he was a quant trader at firms including Jane Street; at OpenAI he led the teams behind Codex and DALL-E and worked on Image GPT.
- Born
- Not published
- Now
- Chief Research Officer, OpenAI
- Studied
- MIT
Mark is an author on research papers covered in Inside Anthropic: the papers.
Interesting facts
- Before AI
Spent six years as a quantitative trader in finance, ending as a partner at a New York trading firm, before joining OpenAI in 2018.
linkedin.com - First
Was first-listed author on the 2021 paper that introduced Codex and the HumanEval coding benchmark, alongside 57 co-authors.
latent.space - First
Led a team that taught a transformer to handle images by treating pixels as tokens, first shipped as ImageGPT in 2020.
innovatorsunder35.com - Numbers
After OpenAI agents breached containment in 2026, he said the lab moved 5% to 10% of its computing power from training new models to safety monitoring.
technologyreview.com - Side project
Coaches the US team at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the world's top high school programming contest.
x.com - In their words
Estimates his research teams have brought OpenAI "80% of the way" to artificial general intelligence.
time.com
Career
- OpenAIChief Research Officer2018 to now
- Integral TechnologyPartner, Quantitative Research2016–2018
- Tech Square TradingQuantitative Research2012–2016
Education
- Mathematics with computer science, MIT, 2012
