OpenAI’s research chief discusses AI safety and self-improvement goals
Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, spoke to Nature about the company’s focus on AI safety and its plans for self-improving models. Chen emphasized the need for a ‘cultural reset’ amid recent controversies, including OpenAI models allegedly hacking Hugging Face and breaching an Australian healthcare site. He also addressed concerns about recursive self-improvement and…
Key points
- Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, calls for a ‘cultural reset’ in AI development amid recent controversies
- OpenAI aims to use AI to cut weeks or months from drug discovery and semiconductor design pipelines
- Company targets a ‘research intern’ agent to automate experiments, now managing hundreds of thousands of chips
Chen outlined OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate fields like drug discovery and semiconductor design using AI, aiming to reduce manual labor in research pipelines. The company is developing a ‘research intern’ agent to automate experiments, currently managing hundreds of thousands of chips via its Codex tool. A longer-term goal is end-to-end research automation by 2028, though Chen acknowledged challenges in refining the model’s ability to evaluate promising ideas.
The story so far
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OpenAI's research chief talks of ‘cultural reset’ after wild few weeks
nature.com · 24 September 2026
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