OpenAI Researcher Rejected by MIT for 'Nonsense' Reasoning Research, Later Built o1
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-08-15
A report by Jiqizhixin tells the story of Giambattista Parascandolo, an OpenAI researcher in reasoning models. In 2020, his talk on using GPT for reasoning was dismissed as 'nonsense' during a faculty interview at MIT, and he didn't get the job. He later joined OpenAI and contributed to GPT-4, o1, and o3. The article reviews his 2020 talk's three future directions: open-ended reasoning, language as a reasoning vehicle, and self-modification/counterfactual simulation, which are now core to reasoning models. It also covers his 2021 blog post comparing pretraining to biological evolution.
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