Jakub Pachocki
OpenAI's chief scientist, who leads the company's research direction and has publicly argued that no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at full speed.
Pachocki became OpenAI’s chief scientist in 2024, taking over research leadership after Ilya Sutskever left. He came up through the competitive programming world and worked on some of OpenAI’s earlier reinforcement learning projects before moving into the top research role.
He is worth knowing because of what he says in public. In September 2026 he published an essay called “An Alien Mind” arguing that the industry needs shared, externally enforced safety standards and that he expects voluntary slowdowns, which is an unusual thing to hear from the person running research at one of the fastest-shipping labs.