Wojciech Zaremba was born in 1988 in Poland and had private lessons in mathematics already in primary school. In 2007, he represented Poland in Vietnam’s 48th International Mathematical Olympiad, winning the silver medal. He studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique, and in 2013 he graduated with honors with two master’s degrees in mathematics. During his undergraduate studies, before 2008, he ended up in Silicon Valley, first working as an intern at NVIDIA. While preparing for his doctoral thesis, he worked at Google Brain, where he spent a year, and then at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, currently Meta AI, where he spent another year. During his stay at Google, he co-authored a paper on the properties of neural networks – the work initiated then was continued. At New York University, under the supervision of promoters Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, “Learning Algorithms from Data.” He defended his dissertation in 2016, obtaining a Ph.D. in computer science.
In 2015, he was among the founders of OpenAI, a non-commercial company engaged in research on artificial intelligence (AI). Among the donors of the project were, among others, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, AWS, Infosys, and YC Research, who contributed a total of USD 1 billion to the project. In 2019, the OpenAI project turned into a hybrid form, as in addition to the non-profit organization, the OpenAI LP for-profit company was established. The project aims to create and improve artificial intelligence: AGI – General Artificial Intelligence, also called strong or full AI.
He led robotics research and, later on, the Codex project and co-founded ChatGPT. At OpenAI, he is the head of the AI research that underpins Copilot, ChatGPT, and future incarnations of GPT, as well as the development of AI domains such as Reinforcement Learning and Active Learning.
In 2015, he received the “Google Ph.D. Fellowship” award and “30 the most influential Polish under the 30s, the Polish edition of Forbes magazine” in 2017. In 2019, he appeared on the list of 35 innovators under age 35, published by the “MIT Technology Review,” which includes the best young scientists worldwide. In 2022, he won the Leaders of the Future plebiscite by “Forbes.” Since 2016, he has lived with his family in San Francisco, USA.