PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Jakub Pachocki

Jakub Pachocki is OpenAI’s chief scientist. He earned a theoretical computer science doctorate at Carnegie Mellon and joined OpenAI in 2017. His work includes a robot hand trained in simulation and OpenAI Five’s Dota 2 system, which defeated Team OG in its defined game setting. OpenAI credited him with leading GPT-4 research and appointed him chief scientist in May 2024. He later co-authored competitive programming research on reasoning models. In his 2026 essay, he described reinforcement learning’s role in that research and discussed alignment and monitoring. His work connects concrete experiments with wider responsibility for the development and study of advanced model systems.

Now at
OpenAI
Works
47

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Photo of Jakub Pachocki

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Joining OpenAI

    Pachocki joined OpenAI as a research scientist in 2017.

  2. 2018

    Learning to move a robot hand

    Pachocki co-authored robot hand learning research in 2018.

  3. 2019

    OpenAI Five

    Pachocki co-authored the 2019 OpenAI Five paper.

  4. May 2024

    Chief scientist

    OpenAI appointed Pachocki chief scientist in May 2024.

  5. February 2025

    Programming experiments

    Pachocki co-authored competitive programming research in 2025.

  6. September 2026

    Explaining reasoning research

    Pachocki published An Alien Mind as chief scientist in September 2026.

Sources and credits

Photo: ICPCNews, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Jakub Pachocki announced as Chief Scientist openai.com. Checked 11 October 2026.
  2. Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation arxiv.org. Checked 11 October 2026.
  3. Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning arxiv.org. Checked 11 October 2026.
  4. GPT-4 contributions openai.com. Checked 11 October 2026.
  5. Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models arxiv.org. Checked 11 October 2026.
  6. An Alien Mind openai.com. Checked 11 October 2026.