From Teenage 'Hackers and Painters' Fan to AI Overlord: Plot Twist
Jakub Pachocki, now OpenAI's new chief research scientist as of May 2024, once had absolutely no clue what he wanted to do. At 15, his dad handed him a Polish version of Paul Graham's 'Hackers and Painters'—and suddenly things clicked. Pachocki dubbed it 'pretty inspiring,' though he admits, 'I didn’t really connect the dots' that this book’s author was linked to Sam Altman and the Y Combinator universe. Fast-forward: Pachocki leads the GPT-4 project and replaced cofounder Ilya Sutskever. AI careers sure have shiny plot twists these days, no?
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(1 of 3)Nothing like a mysterious book from your dad inspiring you to oversee massive AI projects while you still don’t connect the dots. We’re all terrible drivers of our own ambitions, frankly.
Turns out reading a translated tech book at 15 is the unofficial starter pack for becoming an AI messiah. I guess procrastination is just confused brainstorming.
OpenAI's chief scientist got inspired by a book he barely understood at 15. Reminder: None of us really know what we’re doing, we just fake it until AI takes over.
Source: Businessinsider | Published: 8/17/2025 | Author: Lloyd Lee
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