Before AGI Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor: Building AI
5 snips
Jul 31, 2025 
Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, and Szymon Sidor, Technical Fellow at OpenAI, share their journeys in AI from their programming roots in Poland to shaping groundbreaking technologies. They delve into the balance between innovation and safety as AI systems grow more capable. The duo discusses the challenges of developing reasoning models and reflects on societal questions surrounding governance and ethical deployment. Their insights reveal both optimism and caution for the future of AI, urging a focus on responsible practices.
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From Polish Camps To OpenAI
- Jakub and Szymon met in high school in Gdynia and bonded over computer science camps and a supportive teacher.
- Their shared early experiences and competition backgrounds later reunited them at OpenAI where they collaborated closely.
Dota Project Surprise
- Jakub joined a project to teach agents to play Dota 2 and expected tough theoretical barriers.
- Instead, naive scaling worked far better than anticipated and the team spent years scaling and debugging to succeed.
Language Models Learn Semantics
- The sentiment neuron work showed unsupervised models pick up semantics from large text corpora.
- That result shifted thinking toward data-driven semantic learning rather than grammar-first approaches.
