Alec Radford

American machine-learning researcher at OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. from 2016 to 2024 and lead author of several of its foundational systems. His DCGAN paper (2015, with Luke Metz and Soumith Chintala) showed how to train convolutional GANsgenerative adversarial network, n.: Two neural networks trained as rivals: one forges fake images, the other tries to spot the fakes. As both improve, the forger's output becomes realistic enough to fool people. stably, and his 'sentiment neuron' work (2017) found a single unit tracking sentiment in a character-level language model trained only to predict text. He led the original GPTGPT, abbr.: Short for 'generative pre-trained transformer', the family of OpenAI models behind ChatGPT. The letters are also used loosely for any similar chatbot model. (2018), which showed that generative pretrainingpretraining, n.: The first and usually the most expensive stage of building a modern AI model, in which it learns general patterns from enormous amounts of raw text, images or code before being specialized for particular uses. of a transformertransformer, n.: The design behind today's chatbots and much of modern AI. It handles text by letting every word look at every other word and decide which of them matter for understanding it. followed by fine-tuningfine-tuning, n.: Taking an AI model that has already learned a lot and training it a little more on a smaller, focused set of examples so it gets better at one job or behaves a certain way. transfers across language tasks, and GPT-2GPT-2, prop. n.: A 2019 OpenAI language model that wrote surprisingly fluent paragraphs. OpenAI at first withheld the full version, saying it could be misused for fake news, which made it famous. (2019), whose staged release over misuse concerns drew wide attention; he co-authored GPT-3GPT-3, prop. n.: A huge 2020 OpenAI language model that could perform new tasks simply from instructions or a few examples written into its prompt, without retraining. It made prompting a new way of programming. and proximal policy optimizationproximal policy optimization, n.: A widely used method for training AI by trial and error that improves the strategy in small, safe steps; it was the workhorse behind training chatbots like ChatGPT with human feedback.. He also led CLIPCLIP, prop. n.: An OpenAI model that learned to match pictures with their captions from hundreds of millions of web examples, so it can judge how well any piece of text describes any image. (2021), which learned joint image–text representations from 400 million captioned images, and the WhisperWhisper, prop. n.: A free OpenAI model that writes down what is said in recordings in many languages, and can translate it into English; it learned from hundreds of thousands of hours of online audio. speech recognizer (2022). He left OpenAI at the end of 2024 to pursue independent research.