OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge. The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. OpenAI says that this new research goal will be its "North Star" for the next few years, pulling together multiple research strands, including work on reasoning models, agents, and interpretability .

But Altman is not the one building the technology on which its reputation rests. That responsibility falls to OpenAI's twin heads of research--chief research officer Mark Chen and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. Between them, they share the role of making sure OpenAI stays one step ahead of powerhouse rivals like Google. I recently sat down with Chen and Pachocki for an exclusive conversation which covered everything from how they manage the inherent tension between research and product, to what they really mean when they talk about AGI, to what happened to OpenAI's superalignment team. I also wanted to get a sense of where their heads are at in the run-up to OpenAI's biggest product release in months: GPT-5.

I sat down with Chen and Pachocki for an exclusive conversation during a recent trip the pair made to London, where OpenAI set up its first international office in 2023. We talked about how they manage the inherent tension between research and product. We also talked about why they think coding and math are the keys to more capable all-purpose models; what they really mean when they talk about AGI; and what happened to OpenAI's superalignment team, set up by the firm's cofounder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to prevent a hypothetical superintelligence from going rogue, which disbanded soon after he quit. In particular, I wanted to get a sense of where their heads are at in the run-up to OpenAI's biggest product release in months: GPT-5. Reports are out that the firm's next-generation model will be launched in August.

OpenAI Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever is leaving the artificial intelligence company, a departure that ends months of speculation in Silicon Valley about the future of a top AI researcher who played a key role in the brief ouster of Sam Altman last year. Sutskever will be replaced by Research Director Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI said on its blog Tuesday. In a post on X, Sutskever called trajectory of OpenAI "miraculous" and said that he was confident the company will build AI that is "both safe and beneficial" under its current leadership. The exit removes an executive and renowed researcher who has played a pivotal role in the company since its earliest days, helping guide discussions over the safety of AI technology and at times differing with Altman over strategy. When OpenAI was founded in 2015, he served as its research director after being recruited to join the company by Elon Musk.

OpenAI has released its latest version of the language model, GPT-4, which it calls a "milestone in our effort in scaling up deep learning". While the company credits the achievement to a team effort, for OpenAI's founder Sam Altman, one person stands out as a driving force behind the pretraining effort – Jakub Pachocki. GPT-4 was truly a team effort from our entire company, but the overall leadership and technical vision of Jakub Pachocki for the pretraining effort was remarkable and we wouldn't be here without it Pachocki has been with OpenAI since 2017, and his technical vision and leadership played a crucial role in the development of GPT-4. According to Altman, "we wouldn't be here without him". In a recent interview with MIT, he said "That fundamental formula has not changed much for years," talking about the evolution of GPT models since the first version released in 2018.