Jakub Pachocki

Chief Scientist, Openai

Search every verified Jakub Pachocki interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a March 2026 podcast appearance, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki discussed the company’s focus on continual learning, describing it as "the thing that we're building" and "what we're working toward." He addressed the use of math and physics benchmarks as proxies for general intelligence and noted that reinforcement learning is being extended beyond easily-verified domains toward longer-horizon tasks. Pachocki also expressed excitement about the "first proof challenge," a benchmark of unpublished problems from mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists, and recounted how an OpenAI model was prompted to solve those problems during a training run. Pachocki stated that OpenAI believes its models are "capable enough to actually materially change the economy, change how things are done," and said the company feels "a lot of urgency about that." He also acknowledged challenges associated with automating intellectual work, including questions about jobs and wealth concentration, and said that "this requires real policy maker involvement."