People
People at OpenAI
63 people in the USASI People directory whose sourced profiles document a current or earlier role at OpenAI; 17 of them in a current role. Current roles are listed first, then alphabetically. Each profile covers public professional work only. This is not a ranking.
Aditya Ramesh
VP of Research; leads Worldsim
VP of Research at OpenAI who leads Worldsim; first author of DALL·E and DALL·E 2, co-author of CLIP
Alex Nichol
Deep learning research
OpenAI researcher; first author of GLIDE, Improved DDPM, and Point-E; co-author of the HumanEval paper
Eric Mitchell
Co-lead of the Post-training Frontiers team (with Yann Dubois)
Co-lead of OpenAI's Post-training Frontiers team; co-author of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
Greg Brockman
Co-founder and President
Co-founder and President of OpenAI, and Stripe's founding engineer and CTO
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist
Chief Scientist at OpenAI; overall pretraining lead for GPT-4; set research direction for OpenAI Five
Jong Wook Kim
Member of technical staff (since August 2019)
OpenAI member of technical staff; co-author of CLIP and Whisper and maintainer of the Whisper repository
Łukasz Kaiser
Listed under Reasoning Research leadership in the OpenAI o1 System Card; GitHub profile lists OpenAI
OpenAI researcher; co-author of the Transformer paper and the TensorFlow white paper
Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer
Chief Research Officer at OpenAI; first author of the Codex paper that released HumanEval
Noam Brown
Research Scientist
OpenAI research scientist working on reasoning; creator of Libratus and Pluribus; CICERO co-author
Peter Steinberger
Works on agents (since February 2026); leads the Claw Labs team
Creator of OpenClaw, the open-source self-hosted AI assistant; works on agents at OpenAI
Prafulla Dhariwal
Research scientist working on generative models and unsupervised learning
Research scientist at OpenAI; co-author of Diffusion Models Beat GANs, GLIDE, Jukebox, and Glow
Sam Altman
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the team behind ChatGPT and GPT-4, and former president of Y Combinator
Sarah Friar
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI; former CEO of Nextdoor and CFO at Square
Shantanu Jain
Works on language models, including training data and training infrastructure (since 2020)
Author of OpenAI's tiktoken tokenizer; mypy and typeshed maintainer and CPython core developer
Thibault Sottiaux
Head of Codex (OpenAI's title for Sottiaux in May 2026)
Leads Codex, OpenAI's software engineering agent, after guiding Gemini human data work at Google DeepMind
Xinlei Chen
Contributes to OpenAI's multimodal work
Contributes to multimodal work at OpenAI; formerly at xAI and Meta FAIR; first author of SimSiam
Zico Kolter
Member of the Board; chairs the Safety and Security Committee
Head of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department; chairs OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee
Alec Radford
Author affiliated with OpenAI on the scaling-laws (2020), CLIP (2021) and Whisper (2022) papers (earlier role)
First author of GPT-2, CLIP and Whisper at OpenAI; independent researcher on 2026 papers
Alexander Kirillov
Led the multimodal research group (Advanced Voice Mode and GPT-4o) (earlier role)
First author of Segment Anything; works on multimodal models at Thinking Machines; formerly OpenAI and FAIR
Amanda Askell
Research scientist on the policy team (earlier role)
Philosopher who leads Anthropic's Character work; primary author of Claude's constitution
Andrej Karpathy
Research scientist and founding member (2015–2017); later built a team working on midtraining and synthetic data generation (2023–2024) (earlier role)
Wrote llama2.c, a dependency-free C program for running Llama 2 models on a personal computer
Aravind Srinivas
AI researcher (earlier role)
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity; first author of CURL and Bottleneck Transformers
Barret Zoph
VP of Research (Post-Training) (earlier role)
First author of neural architecture search at Google Brain; earlier VP of Research (Post-Training) at OpenAI
Ben Mann
Worked at OpenAI before co-founding Anthropic; second-listed author of the 2020 GPT-3 paper (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder; co-author of the GPT-3 paper and of Anthropic's RLHF and Constitutional AI papers
Bob McGrew
Listed under executive leadership in the OpenAI o1 System Card (2024) (earlier role)
Listed in OpenAI's executive leadership on the o1 System Card; led aspects of OpenAI's robot-hand research
Chris Olah
Led interpretability research (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder working on reverse engineering neural networks; previously led interpretability at OpenAI
Collin Burns
Worked at OpenAI (earlier role)
AI researcher formerly at OpenAI and Anthropic; first author of weak-to-strong generalization research
Daniela Amodei
Vice President of Safety and Policy (earlier role)
Co-founder and President of Anthropic, building the people, culture, and governance behind Claude
Dario Amodei
Vice President of Research (earlier role)
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, a physicist turned AI leader behind Claude and safety research
Diederik P. Kingma
Founding team member and Research Scientist (2015–2018); led the Algorithms team (earlier role)
Researcher at Anthropic; first author of the Variational Autoencoder and Adam optimizer papers
Diogo Almeida
Researcher on instruction-following language models (past) (earlier role)
Founder and CEO of TypeSafe AI; co-author of OpenAI's InstructGPT paper on training with human feedback
Elon Musk
Co-chair (with Sam Altman), as described in a 2016 Senate hearing record (earlier role)
Leader of SpaceX and Tesla, bringing reusable rockets, crewed spacecraft, electric cars, and Grok to the world
Evan Hubinger
Listed as a previous organization on Hubinger's GitHub profile (earlier role)
Alignment Stress-Testing lead at Anthropic; first author of the Sleeper Agents paper
Hyung Won Chung
Research Scientist (earlier role)
Researcher on reasoning and agents, formerly at Google Brain; first author of the Flan-T5 scaling paper
Ian Goodfellow
Research scientist (earlier role)
First author of the Generative Adversarial Networks paper and co-author of the Deep Learning textbook
Ilya Sutskever
Author affiliated with OpenAI on the GPT-3 (2020), CLIP (2021), Codex (2021) and Whisper (2022) papers (earlier role)
Co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc.; co-author of the CLIP, Whisper and GPT-3 papers at OpenAI
Jack Clark
Policy Director (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder and Head of Public Benefit; writes the Import AI newsletter
Jacob Steinhardt
Worked at OpenAI during a postdoc year (earlier role)
UC Berkeley associate professor of Statistics and EECS; founder and CEO of the nonprofit lab Transluce
Jan Leike
Co-led the Superalignment team (earlier role)
Leads the Alignment Science team at Anthropic; formerly co-led Superalignment at OpenAI
Jared Kaplan
Worked on GPT-3 and Codex; listed with Johns Hopkins University and OpenAI on the 2020 scaling-laws paper (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer; first author of the 2020 scaling-laws paper
Jason Wei
Worked on reasoning and agents (2023–2025) (earlier role)
AI researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs; first author of the chain-of-thought prompting paper
Jeff Clune
Research manager (earlier role)
UBC professor and Recursive co-founder; former OpenAI research manager and Senior Research Advisor to DeepMind
Jim Fan
Research intern (2016) (earlier role)
Co-leads NVIDIA's GEAR embodied-agents group; co-author of GR00T N1, Voyager and Eureka
John Schulman
Cofounder; co-led the post-training team (2022–2024) (earlier role)
Co-founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab; OpenAI co-founder and first author of PPO and TRPO
Kenneth Stanley
Open-Endedness Team Leader (earlier role)
SVP of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences; former Open-Endedness Team Leader at OpenAI and creator of NEAT
Liam Fedus
Reasoning research leadership on OpenAI o1 (2024); data flywheel lead on GPT-4 (2023) (earlier role)
On the Periodic Labs team; first author of Switch Transformers; in OpenAI o1 reasoning research leadership
Logan Kilpatrick
Led developer relations (earlier role)
Works on helping developers build with Gemini at Google DeepMind; co-host of Around the Prompt
Mira Murati
Listed under executive leadership in the OpenAI o1 System Card (2024) (earlier role)
Co-founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab; previously in OpenAI's executive leadership
Natalia Gimelshein
Listed with OpenAI as an author of the PyTorch 2 paper (2024) (earlier role)
PyTorch core maintainer for CUDA; co-author of the PyTorch and PyTorch 2 papers
Paul Christiano
Ran the language model alignment team (earlier role)
Executive director of the Alignment Research Center and technical advisor at NIST's CAISI
Pieter Abbeel
Research Scientist (2016–2017) (earlier role)
UC Berkeley professor and Robot Learning Lab director; Amazon Scholar; former OpenAI research scientist
Ronen Eldan
Listed with an OpenAI affiliation on the November 2025 paper "Early science acceleration experiments with GPT-5" (earlier role)
First author of TinyStories and co-author of Microsoft's Phi small language model reports
Sam McCandlish
Built and led a team focused on the science and scaling of machine learning (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Architect; co-led the 2020 scaling-laws research at OpenAI
Sébastien Bubeck
Listed with an OpenAI affiliation on the November 2025 paper "Early science acceleration experiments with GPT-5" (earlier role)
OpenAI author on gpt-oss and GPT-5 science work; earlier a Microsoft GenAI vice president and Phi co-author
Shengjia Zhao
Researcher (GPT-4 reward model lead; o1 foundational contributor) (earlier role)
Researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs; earlier a contributor to GPT-4 and OpenAI o1
Shixiang Shane Gu
Senior researcher on the ChatGPT team (earlier role)
Senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind on Gemini; co-author of Gumbel-Softmax and zero-shot CoT
Shunyu Yao
Researcher (earlier role)
First author of ReAct, Tree of Thoughts and the τ-bench agent benchmark; language-agent researcher
Susan Zhang
Developed a reinforcement learning system for OpenAI Five (earlier role)
Co-first author of Meta AI's OPT; built LLM training infrastructure at FAIR and RL systems for OpenAI Five
Tom Brown
Led the engineering of GPT-3 (earlier role)
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Compute Officer; first author of the GPT-3 paper
Vikash Kumar
Member of technical staff (Apr 2017 – Oct 2017) (earlier role)
Co-founder and CEO of Myolab.ai and CMU adjunct professor; lead creator of MyoSuite and RoboHive
Wojciech Zaremba
Co-founder; co-author of OpenAI's 2016 Gym paper and 2021 Codex paper (earlier role)
OpenAI co-founder; Head of AI Resilience at the OpenAI Foundation
Yang Song
Led the strategic explorations team (earlier role)
Research Principal at Meta Superintelligence Labs; first author of the score SDE and consistency models papers
Zhuohan Li
Member of Technical Staff (earlier role)
Co-creator and lead maintainer of vLLM; AI Research Scientist at Meta focusing on inference
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