Alec RadfordAlec Radford

Born April 1993. Graduated from Olin College of Engineering, a small engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts. Joined OpenAI around 2016 and became one of the most impactful individual contributors in the history of AI. Lead author of GPT-1 (2018), which demonstrated that generative pre-training could produce strong language understanding. Followed with GPT-2 (2019), which was initially withheld due to concerns about misuse. Went on to lead DALL-E (text-to-image generation), CLIP (connecting vision and language), and Whisper (speech recognition). His work essentially created the foundation for the entire GPT era. Left OpenAI in December 2024 and became an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab (2025).