Wojciech Zaremba (born 30 November 1988 in Kluczbork, Poland) is a Polish computer scientist and co-founder of OpenAI (2016–present) whose work spans mathematics, computer science, and deep learning.[25] He completed a Master of Science at the University of Warsaw and École polytechnique, and earned his PhD in 2016 from New York University with the dissertation "Learning algorithms from data," advised by Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus.
He initially led OpenAI's work on robotics, notably creating a robotic arm capable of solving a Rubik's Cube. When the robotics team was dissolved in 2020, he began leading teams working on OpenAI's GPT models, GitHub Copilot, and Codex.[26]
Early life and education
Zaremba was born in Kluczbork, Poland. At a young age, he won local competitions and awards in mathematics, computer science, chemistry and physics.[5] In 2007, Zaremba represented Poland in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Vietnam, and won a silver medal.[27]
Zaremba studied at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique.[29] He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2010, followed by a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's degree in mathematics in 2012, all from the University of Warsaw.[28] He then began his PhD at New York University (NYU) in deep learning under the supervision of Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus.[7] Zaremba graduated and received his PhD in 2016.[8]
Career
During his undergraduate studies, he completed an internship at Nvidia. His PhD was divided between Google Brain, where he spent a year, and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, where he spent another year.[26,31] During his stay at Google, he co-authored work on adversarial examples for neural networks, contributing to foundational research regarding adversarial attacks on neural networks.[32,33] His PhD is focused on matching capabilities of neural networks with the algorithmic power of programmable computers.[13]
In 2015, Zaremba became one of the co-founders of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company.[37,36] At OpenAI, Zaremba worked as robotics research manager until 2020, later managing the development of GitHub Copilot, Codex, and GPT models underlying ChatGPT.[26,16] Zaremba sits on the advisory board of Growbots, a Silicon Valley startup company aiming to automate sales processes with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is also on the advisory board of the Qualia Research Institute.[38]
Honors and awards
Their honors include winning a Silver Medal at the 48th International Mathematical Olympiad held in Vietnam. They were awarded a Google Fellowship in 2015. In 2017, they were listed among the most influential Polish people under 30 by the Polish edition of Forbes magazine.