Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer at OpenAI
OpenAI's chief research officer, who co-leads its research organization and spearheaded DALL-E and Codex.
Biography
Mark Chen is chief research officer at OpenAI, where he co-leads the research division with chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. He joined OpenAI in 2018 after working as a quantitative trader at Jane Street Capital, where he built machine-learning models for futures trading.
At OpenAI he spearheaded DALL-E, the company's image generation model, worked on adding image recognition to GPT-4, and led development of Codex, the coding model that powers GitHub Copilot. MIT Technology Review described him and Pachocki in July 2025 as OpenAI's twin heads of research, with Chen handling the company and people side of tensions between research and product while Pachocki sets the research roadmap. Chen also coaches the USA Computing Olympiad team and has competed in international coding contests. In a September 2026 interview with MIT Technology Review he said OpenAI now monitors training runs, not just deployed models, and has moved 5% to 10% of its computing resources toward safety work.
Notable contributions
Spearheaded DALL-E
Led OpenAI's work on DALL-E, its image generation model, and worked on adding image recognition to GPT-4.
Led development of Codex
Led development of Codex, the coding model that powers GitHub Copilot.
Became OpenAI's chief research officer
Co-leads OpenAI's research division as chief research officer alongside chief scientist Jakub Pachocki.
