OpenAI Chief Research Scientist: Book That Inspired Him in High School

OpenAI chief research scientist, Jakub Pachocki, didn’t always know he’d be on the front lines of artificial intelligence development.

In OpenAI’s latest podcast episode, published Friday, Pachocki said he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his career as a teenager in high school. He recalled one book that inspired him during those searchful, formative years: “Hackers and Painters” by Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.

“My dad gave me this book when I was, I think I was like 15, I was pretty unsure of what I wanted to do,” Pachocki said. “It was a Polish version of a book by some author I didn’t know called ‘Hackers and Painters.’”

“I found that pretty inspiring,” he added. Pachocki joined OpenAI in 2017. He has overseen the development of GPT-4 and replaced OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist in May 2024.

“Hackers and Painters” contains a collection of essays from Graham, including one based on a guest lecture he gave at Harvard University about the similarities between hacking and painting.

“What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers,” Graham wrote. “Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.”

Having one of the key figures at Sam Altman’s company inspired by Graham is a bit of a full-circle moment.

Graham published “Hackers and Painters” in 2004, about a year before the investor co-founded Y Combinator and met 19-year-old Stanford dropout Altman. Altman’s startup at the time, Loopt, would be one of the first batch of companies backed by the startup accelerator.

In 2009, Graham added Altman to his list of five of the “most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.” Five years later, he chose Altman to take his position as Y Combinator’s president.

“It’s actually very hilarious thinking about it now,” Pachocki said. “I didn’t really connect the dots.”

Pachocki and Graham did not immediately respond to a request for comment.