Alec Radford
Independent AI researcher
The lead author of OpenAI's original GPT paper, who also worked on Whisper and DALL-E before leaving to pursue independent research.
Biography
Alec Radford is an American artificial intelligence researcher born in 1993 who grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He dropped out of Olin College in 2014, where he and fellow students had formed the startup Indico. He joined OpenAI around 2016 to work on natural-language processing.
In 2017 he trained a neural network on Amazon reviews and found a neuron linked to review sentiment that the model had created on its own, an early sign that models trained on diverse language data might learn rich structure. In 2018 he was lead author of OpenAI's paper on generative pre-trained transformers, the foundation of ChatGPT. His work at OpenAI also included Whisper, a speech recognition model, and the image generator DALL-E. He left OpenAI in December 2024 to pursue independent research and later advised Thinking Machines Lab.
Notable contributions
Lead author of the first GPT paper
Was lead author of OpenAI's 2018 research paper on generative pre-trained transformers, which form the foundation of ChatGPT.
Worked on Whisper and DALL-E
At OpenAI, contributed to Whisper, a speech recognition model, and the image generator DALL-E.
Discovered a sentiment neuron
In 2017 found that a network trained on Amazon reviews had learned a neuron tracking sentiment without being told to, an early sign of what pretraining on language could yield.
Career history
Researcher
