Harvard Physicist Xi Yin Leaves OpenAI After Six Months

量子位 · wechat · 2026-11-04

Xi Yin, the youngest Chinese full professor in Harvard's history and a string theorist, announced he is leaving OpenAI roughly six months after news of his joining surfaced in late May. He called it a great journey but said he is getting off early to explore new directions, without naming a next stop; Harvard's physics department still lists him as a professor.

Yin entered USTC's youth class at 12, earned a Harvard physics PhD in 2006, became a full professor at 31 in 2015, and won a Sloan Fellowship and the 2017 New Horizons in Physics Prize. He has been outspoken on AI: in an April interview he said no human intellectual capability is beyond AI's reach, estimating AI sped up his research coding at least 100x. When 25 Fields Medalists including Terence Tao warned that AI firms treat math problems as a benchmark race, Yin sided with critics of that view, arguing that if answers can be verified, AI running ahead is welcome.

A wave of mathematicians and physicists have joined OpenAI for Science, including black-hole physicist Alex Lupsasca, statistician Weijie Su and theoretical computer scientist Lijie Chen.

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Harvard Physicist Xi Yin Leaves OpenAI After Six Months

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