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.