# Mark Chen

Chief Research Officer, OpenAI. TIME100 AI 2026, Leaders. 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. ([event.technologyreview.com](https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-mit-2023/speaker/901826/mark-chen))

- Education: Mathematics with computer science, MIT, 2012 ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/markchen90))
- Career: OpenAI (Chief Research Officer, 2018 to now); Integral Technology (Partner, Quantitative Research, 2016–2018); Tech Square Trading (Quantitative Research, 2012–2016) ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/markchen90), [openai.com](https://openai.com/index/leadership-updates-march-2025/))
- TIME profile: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/mark-chen-sam-altman-greg-brockman/
- Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/mark-chen

- 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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/markchen90))
- Was first-listed author on the 2021 paper that introduced Codex and the HumanEval coding benchmark, alongside 57 co-authors. ([latent.space](https://latent.space/wiki/mark-chen/))
- Led a team that taught a transformer to handle images by treating pixels as tokens, first shipped as ImageGPT in 2020. ([innovatorsunder35.com](https://www.innovatorsunder35.com/the-list/mark-chen/))
- 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](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/30/1145339/were-not-going-to-shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot-over-hugging-face-says-openais-chief-research-officer/amp/))
- Coaches the US team at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the world's top high school programming contest. ([x.com](https://x.com/markchen90))
- Estimates his research teams have brought OpenAI "80% of the way" to artificial general intelligence. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/mark-chen-sam-altman-greg-brockman/))