Wojciech Zaremba

Wojciech Zaremba (born 30 November 1988) is a Polish computer scientist and co-founder of OpenAI (2016–present).^[1] He initially led OpenAI's work on robotics, notably creating a robotic arm capable of solving Rubik's Cube. When the team was dissolved in 2020, he began leading teams working on OpenAI's GPT models, GitHub Copilot, and Codex.^[2]

Wojciech Zaremba
Born	(1988-11-30) 30 November 1988 (age 36) Kluczbork, Poland
Alma mater	University of Warsaw (MS) New York University (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics Computer science Deep learning
Institutions	OpenAI
Thesis	Learning algorithms from data (2016)
Doctoral advisor	Yann LeCun Rob Fergus

Early life and education

Zaremba was born in Kluczbork, Poland. At a young age, he won local competitions and awards in mathematics, computer science, chemistry and physics.^[3] In 2007, Zaremba represented Poland in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Vietnam, and won a silver medal.^[4]

Zaremba studied at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique mathematics and computer science, and graduated in 2013 with two master's degrees in mathematics. He then began his PhD at New York University (NYU) in deep learning under the supervision of Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus.^[5] Zaremba graduated and received his PhD in 2016.^[6][7]

Career

During his bachelor studies, he spent time at NVIDIA before the deep learning era. His PhD was divided between Google Brain where he spent a year, and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research where he spent another year.^[2][8]

During his stay at Google, he co-authored work on adversarial examples for neural networks.^[9] This result created the field of adversarial attacks on neural networks.^[10]

His PhD is focused on matching capabilities of neural networks with the algorithmic power of programmable computers.^{[11][12][13][14]}

In 2015, Zaremba became one of the co-founders of OpenAI,^[15] an artificial intelligence research company whose stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence "benefits all of humanity".^[16] In OpenAl, Zaremba has worked as robotics research manager until 2020, then managing the development of GitHub Copilot, and Codex, and GPT models underlying ChatGPT.^[2]

Zaremba sits on the advisory board of Growbots,^[17] a Silicon Valley startup company aiming to automate sales processes with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is also on the advisory board of the Qualia Research Institute.^[18]

Honors and awards

• Listed among the most influential Polish under 30s, Polish edition of Forbes magazine 2017^[19]
• Google Fellowship 2015^[20]
• Silver Medal in 48th International Mathematical Olympiad, Vietnam^[4]