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John Schulman

Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab

Verified interview transcripts, podcast appearances, and direct quotes from John Schulman, Chief Scientist at Thinking Machines Lab. AI-verified speaker identity with full-text searchable transcripts.

Recent appearances

  • AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

    September 11, 2026 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    New episode with John Schulman, Charlie O’Neill, and Beren Millidge. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/john-beren... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ePd... 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 Antithesis helps you trust your code. As agents generate more and more of your software, the bottleneck shifts from your engineers actuall…

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  • John Schulman on dead ends, scaling RL, and building research institutions

    December 17, 2025 · 📺 Cursor

    A conversation with John Schulman on the first year LLMs could have been useful, building research teams, and where RL goes from here. 00:00 - Speedrunning ChatGPT 09:22 - Archetypes of research managers 11:56 - Was OpenAI inspired by Bell Labs? 16:54 - The absence of value functions 18:23 - Continual learning 21:09 - Brittle generalization 24:05 - Co-training generators and verifiers, GANs 27:06 - John’s personal use of AI for research 28:54 - Day in the life 33:01 - Slowdowns in consequential ML ideas 36:21 - "Peer review" within the labs 39:19 - Distribution shift in researchers 43:33 - Fu…

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  • Scale AI Leadership Summit 2024: Lightning Talk with John Schulman

    November 20, 2024 · 📺 Scale

    Hosted by Scale CEO Alexandr Wang and entrepreneur and investor, Nat Friedman, the AI Leadership Summit brought together the world’s foremost AI leaders and industry executives to explore the blueprint to develop and implement AI. In this lightning talk, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, John Schulman, discusses OpenAI's Model Spec based on the work he did at OpenAI as Head of Post-training. Visit us at scale.com to learn more.

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  • [07] John Schulman - Optimizing Expectations: From Deep RL to Stochastic Computation Graphs (9/2020)

    November 06, 2024 · 📺 Thesis Review Podcast

    Originally released September 2020: John Schulman is a Research Scientist and co-founder of Open AI. John co-leads the reinforcement learning team, researching algorithms that safely and efficiently learn by trial and error and by imitating humans. His PhD thesis is titled "Optimizing Expectations: From Deep Reinforcement Learning to Stochastic Computation Graphs", which he completed in 2016 at Berkeley. We talk about his work on stochastic computation graphs and TRPO, how it evolved to PPO and how it's used in large-scale applications like Open AI Five, as well as his recent work on general…

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  • John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI

    May 15, 2024 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    John Schulman on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come... 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ivz... Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/john-... Me on Twitter:   / dwarkesh_sp   𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑 CommandBar is an AI user assistant that any software product can embed to non-annoyingly assist, support, and unleash their users. Used by forward-thinking CX, product, growth, and marketing teams. Learn more at https://www.commandbar.com/ If you’re interested in advertising on the po…

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  • John Schulman - Proxy Objectives in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback | ICML 2023

    October 27, 2023 · 📺 Nathan Lile

    slideslive.com/39004369/proxy-objectives-in-reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback.

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  • Deep RL Bootcamp Lecture 6: Nuts and Bolts of Deep RL Experimentation

    October 05, 2017 · 📺 AI Prism

    Instructor: John Schulman (OpenAI) Lecture 6 Deep RL Bootcamp Berkeley August 2017 Nuts and Bolts of Deep RL Experimentation

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