Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist, OpenAI · Gold Medalist, International Olympiad in Informatics
Key facts
- Serves as Chief Scientist at OpenAI, playing a primary role in directing frontier AI research and large-scale model architectures.
- Transferred to Gdynia's Secondary School No. 3 to learn under Ryszard Szubartowski, where the educational environment catered to his dynamic learning style and creative imagination.
- Medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics who formed an exceptional high school duo with classmate Szymon Sidor.
- Earned his PhD in two years via a competition in the US after an administrative error in Poland caused him to be mistakenly struck off his university student list.
- In September 2026 published "An Alien Mind", an essay analyzing the risks tied to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/).
Biography
Jakub Pachocki is a Polish computer scientist and Chief Scientist at OpenAI, the role he took in May 2024 after Ilya Sutskever left the company. Born in Gdańsk in 1991 and shaped as a student in Gdynia, he became an International Olympiad in Informatics medalist, a Google Code Jam champion and a University of Warsaw graduate before earning his PhD in theoretical computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. At OpenAI, which he joined in 2017, he led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five as Director of Research, and in September 2026 he published the essay "An Alien Mind" on the risks of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence.