In this episode, we have Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, joining us to make Korean tofu stew and flambé shrimp. From scaling laws and why pre-training is not dead, to the o1 reasoning bet, evals crisis, research taste, long-context learning, and the future of end-to-end AI research, we cover what it takes to push models toward the frontier.

We talk about: • Why Mark still believes in scaling laws and the exponential • How OpenAI chooses research bets and allocates compute • Why reasoning became one of OpenAI’s biggest bets • How to develop research taste without a traditional ML background • Why evals are in crisis and benchmarks can be misleading • What it takes for models to do long-horizon, real-world work • How AI could change the future of research itself