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Mark Chen

Chief Research Officer, OpenAI

Search every verified Mark Chen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, appeared on the podcast "Let Them Cook" on June 25, 2026, where he discussed the company's research direction. Chen stated that he "firmly believes in being on the exponential and in scaling laws" and said he "fairly strongly disagrees" with views that pre-training is dead, noting that such narratives have recurred throughout the history of developing large language models. He described reasoning as "one of the biggest examples" of a research bet at OpenAI, referencing the o1 model as a breakthrough that was difficult to get off the ground because the pre-training plus post-training paradigm "felt like such a promising paradigm" at the time. Chen also said the field is in an "evals crisis," with a low number of canonical gold standard benchmarks, and noted that tools like Codex have enabled faster iteration of evaluations. On June 16, 2026, Chen appeared alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at an event in Tokyo where SoftBank announced a cybersecurity service using OpenAI's technology. Chen described cyber capabilities as a "dual-use capability," stating that "even though the models can get better and better at finding vulnerabilities, we can use that for defense." He added that "the important thing is we can go and try the models and try to find the vulnerabilities before external actors can go and try to find the same vulnerabilities." Son compared the dynamic to a criminal with a knife facing a police officer with a gun, saying defenders must have the "best, most powerful weapon" to defend against bad actors.

Recent appearances

  • OpenAI’s Research Playbook: Scaling Laws, Reasoning, Evals, and AGI — Mark Chen | Let Them Cook

    June 25, 2026 · 📺 Latent Space

    In this episode, we have Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, joining us to make Korean tofu stew and flambé shrimp. From scaling laws and why pre-training is not dead, to the o1 reasoning bet, evals crisis, research taste, long-context learning, and the future of end-to-end AI research, we cover what it takes to push models toward the frontier. We talk about: • Why Mark still believes in scaling laws and the exponential • How OpenAI chooses research bets and allocates compute • Why reasoning became one of OpenAI’s biggest bets • How to develop research taste without a traditional ML…

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  • Japan's tech business SoftBank rolls out OpenAI 'patches' against cyberattacks

    June 21, 2026 · 📺 AP Archive

    (16 Jun 2026) RESTRICTION SUMMARY: ASSOCIATED PRESS Tokyo, Japan - 16 June 2026 1. CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son speaking on stage 2. SOUNDBITE (Japanese) Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank: “It's not an attack launched by humans with bamboo spears, but a machine gun – it uses a machine, a machine to attack. What would happen if you were hit by hundreds of millions of cyberattacks every year? And not just from one angle, but from all directions—vertically, horizontally, diagonally, from every conceivable angle.” 3. Audience listening to Son 4. SOUNDBITE (Japanese) Masayoshi Son, CEO of…

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  • Terence Tao and Mark Chen - Fireside Chat with James Donovan - IPAM at UCLA

    March 09, 2026 · 📺 Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM)

    Recorded 04 March 2026. James Donovan of OpenAI welcomes Terence Tao of UCLA and Mark Chen of OpenAI for a Fireside Chat at IPAM's Accelerating Math and Theoretical Physics with AI Workshop. Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/sp...

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  • How OpenAI Shapes Its Research And What's Next - EP 46 Mark Chen

    December 01, 2025 · 📺 Core Memory Podcast

    Mark Chen is one of the most influential people in artificial intelligence, and this episode is a rare look inside his world. As the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, Chen helps decide which ideas get compute, which research threads scale, and how a 500-person lab navigates constant recruiting raids, model races, and the pressure to invent the next paradigm. We talk about the soup-delivering recruiting wars, how OpenAI thinks about staying ahead of Meta and Google, and what it actually feels like to rank 300 internal research projects when everyone believes theirs is the one that matters. We…

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  • 바이브 코딩에서 바이브 연구로: OpenAI GPT-5와 추론 AI의 미래 (한글자막)

    November 16, 2025 · 📺 Optimistic Engineer: aicf

    OpenAI의 최고 연구 책임자(CRO) Mark Chen과 수석 과학자(Chief Scientist) Jakub Pachocki가 a16z 팟캐스트에서 GPT-5, 추론 AI, 그리고 AI 연구의 미래에 대해 심도 있게 이야기합니다. 🎯 주요 내용 00:00 인트로 - OpenAI 연구팀 소개 02:15 GPT-5 출시 이야기 - 추론의 주류화 07:30 평가(Evals)와 벤치마크 포화 문제 12:45 강화학습(RL)이 계속 성공하는 이유 18:20 자동화된 연구원(Automated Researcher) 목표 24:10 에이전트와 긴 시간 지평선 추론 29:35 수학·과학 이외 영역으로의 확장 35:00 GPT-5 Codex - 실제 코딩 환경 최적화 41:15 바이브 코딩(Vibe Coding)에서 바이브 연구(Vibe Researching)로 47:00 훌륭한 연구자가 되는 법 52:20 OpenAI 연구 문화와 인재 채용 58:30 기초 연구 보호와 제품 개발의 균형 01:04:00 컴퓨팅 리소스와 우선순위 설정 01:09:15 대학 연구와 Frontier AI의 융합 01:15:45 Mark와 Jakub의 협업 스토리 💡 핵심 인사이트 •…

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  • From Vibe Coding to Vibe Researching: OpenAI’s Mark Chen and Jakub Pachocki

    September 25, 2025 · 📺 a16z

    What comes after vibe coding? Maybe vibe researching. OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Jakub Pachocki, and Chief Research Officer, Mark Chen, join a16z general partners Anjney Midha and Sarah Wang to go deep on GPT-5—how they fused fast replies with long-horizon reasoning, how they measure progress once benchmarks saturate, and why reinforcement learning keeps surprising skeptics. They explore agentic systems (and their stability tradeoffs), coding models that change how software gets made, and the bigger bet: an automated researcher that can generate new ideas with real economic impact. Plus: how…

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  • Leaked AI secrets at Anti Fund Summit ft: OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen

    September 22, 2025 · 📺 Geoffrey Woo

    Leaked session from Anti Fund's Summit at ‪@jakepaul‬ ranch with AI industry titan Mark Chen, ‪@OpenAI‬'s Chief Research Officer. He is one of the key masterminds behind ChatGPT and the AI revolution happening right now. You usually have to be in the room to learn, but now we leak it to you on ‪@geoffreywooshow‬ channel.   / geoffreywoo     / jakepaul     / antifund   More on Anti Fund and OpenAI: https://www.antifund.com https://www.openai.com

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  • OpenAI LIVE: Greg Brockman, Mark Chen & More

    August 07, 2025 · 📺 John Coogan

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  • Mark Chen: GPT-5, Open-Source, Agents, Future of OpenAI, and more!

    August 07, 2025 · 📺 Matthew Berman

    Download (GPT-5 UPDATED) Humanities Last Prompt Engineering Guide (free) http://bit.ly/4m76knm Join My Newsletter for ...

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  • Live: OpenAI announces launch of ChatGPT-5

    August 07, 2025 · 📺 The Independent

    OpenAI hosts a livestream event to release the long awaited GPT-5 AI model. Livestream courtesy of OpenAI. Watch more on Independent TV: https://tinyurl.com/yc7ukx9n The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking newsbrand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. Subscribe: https://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-Independent Find us on social: TikTok /   / independent   Instagram /   / the.independent   X (Twitter) /   / independent   Facebook /   / theindependentonline   Download the iOS & Android app: https://tinyurl.com/2s3ts5dh Sign up to our newsletters:…

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  • Inside ChatGPT, AI assistants, and building at OpenAI — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 2

    July 01, 2025 · 📺 OpenAI

    Why was OpenAI surprised by ChatGPT’s success? What does it really mean to “reason” in an AI system? And what’s next for agentic coding and multimodal assistants? OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen unpack it all in a conversation that pulls back the curtain on the making of OpenAI’s most iconic product. 00:00 Intro: Meet Nick Turley and Mark Chen 00:40 Origin of the name "ChatGPT" 03:50 ChatGPT’s viral takeoff 07:00 Internal debate before launch 9:40 Evolution of OpenAI’s launch approach 11:00 The sycophancy incident and RLHF 14:45 Balancing usefulness vs.…

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  • Mark Chen: On AI’s New Frontiers

    June 25, 2025 · 📺 Arm®

    Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, joins Arm CEO and host Rene Haas for a conversation about pioneering new frontiers in AI. Mark tells Rene about his roundabout path to AI research and how he integrates research and product development to drive scientific progress at OpenAI. Tech Unheard is a podcast from Arm. Find each episode in your podcast feed monthly.  The Future of AI is built on Arm. Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media. Executive Producers Erica Osher and Shannon Boerner. Project Manager Colin Harden. Creative Lead Producer Isabel…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“If we had 3x the compute today I could immediately utilize that very effectively; if we had 10x the compute today, probably within a small number of weeks fully utilize that productively.”

“The next set of evals and milestone that we're looking at will involve actual movement on things that are economically relevant.”

“I think energy is still a really good investment, and it's definitely not priced in. Most people still don't understand what's coming.”

“The deeper game is securing compute and energy — that's the real battle; researchers can't be productive unless they're running at multiples of compute and everyone is scrambling to lock that down.”

“We want to raise the bar in terms of what we consider acceptable for release for open source, and we've done a lot of extensive safety work on this model.”

“We really do believe in the potential for synthetic data to be higher quality and to improve the model in meaningful ways beyond just broadening or deepening surface-level knowledge in a particular category.”

Other executives at OpenAI

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →