Wojciech Zaremba

Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist and a co-founder of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company started in December 2015, where he has worked since the company's founding. At OpenAI he first led the robotics group that built the Dactyl robot hand and the OpenAI Gym toolkit, then moved to language and code work that fed into Codex and the GPT models, and later focused on safety and alignment research, including the deliberative alignment method used to train OpenAI's reasoning models. ^[1][2][3] As of 2026 he leads the OpenAI Foundation's AI Resilience program as its Head of AI Resilience, directing grant funding aimed at biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and AI's effects on young people. ^[21][22]

Before OpenAI, Zaremba completed a doctorate at New York University while interning at Google Brain and Facebook AI Research, now part of Meta AI. During that period he co-authored "Intriguing properties of neural networks," the 2013 paper that introduced the idea of adversarial examples, and several early papers on recurrent networks and sequence-to-sequence learning written with Ilya Sutskever. ^[4][5][6]

Who is Wojciech Zaremba?

Wojciech Zaremba is one of the small number of founding members who remain at OpenAI nearly a decade after it was created. ^[1][3] He was born on 30 November 1988 in Kluczbork, Poland. ^[3] As a student he took part in mathematics and science competitions, and in 2007 he won a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad held in Vietnam. ^[3][7]

He studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw, completing a master's degree in 2012, and he also spent time at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. ^[3] In September 2013 he enrolled in the computer science doctoral program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. ^[8] His doctoral work was supervised by Rob Fergus within the university's deep learning group, which also included Yann LeCun. ^[3][8] Zaremba finished the PhD in 2016, and he received a Google PhD Fellowship in 2015. ^[3]

During the doctorate he held internships at Nvidia, Google Brain, and Facebook AI Research. ^[3][8] Much of his published research from this time concerned the limits and behavior of neural networks. In late 2013 he was the second author of "Intriguing properties of neural networks," a paper written with Christian Szegedy, Ilya Sutskever, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow, and Rob Fergus. ^[4] The paper showed that small, almost imperceptible changes to an image could make a trained network misclassify it, and that the same change often fooled different networks. This finding helped open the study of adversarial examples and adversarial robustness. ^[4]

Zaremba also worked on recurrent networks and sequence-to-sequence models. With Ilya Sutskever and Oriol Vinyals he wrote "Recurrent Neural Network Regularization" in 2014, which described how to apply dropout to long short-term memory networks. ^[5] With Sutskever he wrote "Learning to Execute," which trained a network to read short computer programs character by character and predict their output, and which introduced a form of curriculum learning. ^[6] These projects were carried out while he was affiliated with Google. ^[5][6]

When did Wojciech Zaremba co-found OpenAI?

In December 2015 Zaremba became one of the co-founders of OpenAI, joining a group that included Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others, with early funding from backers such as Elon Musk. ^[3][9] According to a New York University alumni interview, he turned down job offers from Google and Facebook to help start the new lab while he was still finishing his PhD. ^[8] OpenAI was set up as a research organization with a stated mission to build artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity. ^[9]

Zaremba is frequently described as one of the few founding members who have stayed with the company over its first decade. ^[1][3]

What was the Dactyl robot project?

In OpenAI's early years Zaremba led its robotics effort. One of the group's first releases, in 2016, was OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for reinforcement learning research that provided a shared interface to many benchmark environments. The accompanying paper listed Zaremba as a co-author together with Greg Brockman, Vicki Cheung, Ludwig Pettersson, Jonas Schneider, John Schulman, and Jie Tang. ^[10] Gym became a widely used standard for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. ^[10]

The robotics group went on to study dexterous manipulation with a physical robot hand. In 2018 the team presented Dactyl, described in the work "Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation." ^[11] Dactyl used a Shadow Dexterous Hand to reorient a block placed in its palm. The system was trained entirely in simulation using the same general reinforcement learning code as the OpenAI Five project, and it relied on a method called domain randomization, in which many physical properties of the simulated world were varied so that a single policy could transfer to real hardware. ^[11] Zaremba was among the authors of the paper. ^[11]

In 2019 the same line of research produced "Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand," in which a robot hand learned to manipulate and solve a Rubik's cube one-handed. ^[12] The work extended the simulation-to-reality approach with a technique the team called automatic domain randomization, which gradually increased the difficulty and variety of the simulated environments during training. ^[12] The demonstration drew wide attention as an example of transferring skills learned in simulation to a complex real-world task. ^[12]

OpenAI wound down its dedicated robotics team around 2021. In a podcast interview, Zaremba explained that the group had bet on going far with self-generated data and reinforcement learning, but that some components were missing and that progress was limited by the amount of available training data relative to the compute that robotics would require. ^[13] He suggested the work could resume once stronger models, including video models, became available. ^[13]

What did Wojciech Zaremba do on Codex and language models?

After the robotics team closed, Zaremba moved to language and code generation. He was an author of the 2021 paper "Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code," which introduced Codex, a model fine-tuned on publicly available source code. ^[14] The paper measured the model's ability to write Python programs from natural language descriptions and released a benchmark called HumanEval for that purpose. ^[14] A production version of Codex powered GitHub Copilot, an autocompletion tool for programmers. ^[14] The Codex paper was led by Mark Chen and included co-authors such as Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Alec Radford, and Dario Amodei. ^[14]

Zaremba has described his role at OpenAI as spanning the design, training, and refinement of large models, including work on the GPT family and on the human-feedback infrastructure that guides model behavior through reinforcement learning. ^[15][8] In interviews he has said he uses the company's models in his own daily work, including for writing. ^[8]

What is deliberative alignment?

In more recent years Zaremba concentrated on AI safety and alignment. He championed a training method called deliberative alignment, described in a December 2024 paper. ^[16] The method gives a model the text of human-written safety specifications and trains it to reason about those rules explicitly before answering. ^[16] According to OpenAI, deliberative alignment was used to align its o-series reasoning models, allowing them to reflect on a prompt, recall relevant policy, and produce safer responses, while improving robustness to jailbreaks and reducing unnecessary refusals. ^[16] Zaremba publicly said he viewed the approach as one that might apply to artificial general intelligence and beyond. ^[17]

In August 2025 Zaremba called for AI laboratories to test one another's models for safety. ^[18] He spoke about a pilot collaboration in which OpenAI and Anthropic each gave the other access to versions of their frontier models so that each company could run its own safety and alignment evaluations on the rival's systems. ^[18][19] The exercise, run during the middle of 2025, was meant to surface blind spots that an internal team might miss, such as a model presenting itself as aligned while pursuing other goals, and to set a precedent for cross-lab accountability. ^[18][19] Zaremba argued that the industry was entering a consequential stage, with models used by very large numbers of people, and that shared safety standards were becoming more important even amid heavy competition for talent and customers. ^[18] He has also spoken about risks such as sycophancy, where a model reinforces a user's harmful behavior, and about the responsibility that comes with systems used in sensitive settings like mental health. ^[18]

What does Wojciech Zaremba work on at OpenAI now?

In 2026 Zaremba moved from frontier research to the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, where he leads its AI Resilience program as Head of AI Resilience. ^[21][22] The program describes "AI resilience" as an ecosystem approach to reducing the risks of advanced AI so that society can capture its benefits, and it concentrates on four areas: pathogen-agnostic biosecurity, cyber-resilience for critical systems, AI model safety, and AI's impact on young people. ^[21]

In a June 2026 essay announcing the work, Zaremba framed the effort around the idea that technical alignment alone is not enough. "No general purpose technology ever made itself safe," he wrote, arguing that the early OpenAI team had believed that benefit to society depended primarily on solving the technical alignment problem, but that this is now seen as only one part of the puzzle. ^[21]

The Foundation said it was working to finalize more than $130 million in grants through the AI Resilience program in its first months, that it expects to invest more than $1 billion across its programs over the following year, and that it anticipates directing about $25 billion toward AI Resilience and toward Life Sciences and Curing Disease in the years ahead. ^[21][22] The move makes Zaremba one of the people overseeing how the Foundation deploys that funding. ^[22]

What is Wojciech Zaremba known for?

Sources consistently describe Zaremba as one of the most senior research leaders associated with OpenAI and as one of the few founders who have stayed since 2015. ^[1][15] Across his career his stated interests have covered reinforcement learning, large neural networks, robotics, and alignment, and in 2026 his work shifted toward funding and coordinating the broader safety ecosystem through the Foundation. ^[15][3][21]

What awards has Wojciech Zaremba received?

Zaremba's honors include a silver medal at the 2007 International Mathematical Olympiad, a Google PhD Fellowship in 2015, a place on the Forbes Poland 30 Under 30 list in 2017, and selection for MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2019. ^[3][7][20]

Selected facts

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References

1. WhatJobs News, "Who Really Built ChatGPT? Meet Wojciech Zaremba." https://www.whatjobs.com/news/who-really-built-chatgpt-meet-wojciech-zaremba/ ↩
2. The Poland News, "Meet Wojciech Zaremba: The Quiet Co-Founder Who Shaped OpenAI." https://thepolandnews.com/meet-wojciech-zaremba/ ↩
3. Wikipedia, "Wojciech Zaremba." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Zaremba ↩
4. Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, et al., "Intriguing properties of neural networks," arXiv:1312.6199, 2013. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199 ↩
5. Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, "Recurrent Neural Network Regularization," arXiv:1409.2329, 2014. https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2329 ↩
6. Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, "Learning to Execute," arXiv:1410.4615, 2014. https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615 ↩
7. International Mathematical Olympiad, results for 2007 (Vietnam). https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2007 ↩
8. New York University, Courant Institute, "Alumni Q&A with Wojciech Zaremba, Co-Founder of OpenAI." https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1428/ ↩
9. The Robot Report, "Why OpenAI decided to abandon robotics research." https://www.therobotreport.com/openai-abandons-robotics-research/ ↩
10. Greg Brockman, Vicki Cheung, Ludwig Pettersson, et al., "OpenAI Gym," arXiv:1606.01540, 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01540 ↩
11. OpenAI, "Learning dexterous in-hand manipulation," arXiv:1808.00177, 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00177 ↩
12. OpenAI, "Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand," arXiv:1910.07113, 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07113 ↩
13. The Robot Report, "Why OpenAI decided to abandon robotics research" (Zaremba podcast remarks). https://www.therobotreport.com/openai-abandons-robotics-research/ ↩
14. Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Wojciech Zaremba, et al., "Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code," arXiv:2107.03374, 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03374 ↩
15. PolandWeekly, "The Polish Mind Behind ChatGPT." https://polandweekly.com/2025/03/01/the-polish-mind-behind-chatgpt/ ↩
16. OpenAI, "Deliberative alignment: reasoning enables safer language models," arXiv:2412.16339, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16339 ↩
17. The Decoder, "OpenAI co-founder says new AI safety approach may apply to AGI and beyond." https://the-decoder.com/openai-co-founder-says-new-ai-safety-approach-may-apply-to-agi-and-beyond/ ↩
18. TechCrunch, "OpenAI co-founder calls for AI labs to safety-test rival models," 27 August 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/27/openai-co-founder-calls-for-ai-labs-to-safety-test-rival-models/ ↩
19. Dataconomy, "OpenAI and Anthropic team up for joint AI safety study," 28 August 2025. https://dataconomy.com/2025/08/28/openai-and-anthropic-team-up-for-joint-ai-safety-study/ ↩
20. Global Speakers Bureau, "Wojciech Zaremba." https://www.gspeakers.com/our-speakers/wojciech-zaremba/ ↩
21. Wojciech Zaremba, OpenAI Foundation, "Resilience in the age of AI," 1 June 2026. https://openaifoundation.org/news/resilience-in-the-age-of-ai ↩
22. Alex Heath, Sources, "OpenAI's quiet co-founder steps out," 2 June 2026. https://sources.news/p/openais-quiet-co-founder-steps-out ↩