[News] OpenAI Loses Key Reasoning Leader Jerry Tworek: 7-Year VP Departs, Citing Research Limitations

As OpenAI teams up with tech giants led by NVIDIA, AMD and Broadcom, the ChatGPT maker is losing some of its most precious talents in the meantime. According to The Verge, citing Jerry Tworek’s X, the company’s Vice President of Research officially announced his departure after a seven-year tenure at the company, explaining that he wants to pursue research that is difficult to carry out within OpenAI.

According to his personal homepage, Tworek led research at OpenAI focused on training language models to tackle challenges in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and programming.

While tech talent often comes and goes, Chinese media outlet 36Kr, citing WeChat account Xin Zhi Yuan, described Tworek’s departure as a major blow, calling him one of OpenAI’s most influential technical leaders, as he played a central role in teaching ChatGPT to write code and enabling AI to think more like humans.

The report notes that he directly addressed two of the toughest commercial applications for large language models (LLMs): programming and complex reasoning, earning him the titles “Father of Reasoning Models” (o1/o3 series) and “Father of Programming/Code” (Codex).

36Kr also highlights his pivotal role in GPT-4, where he enabled the model to tackle complex programming challenges, and in 2025, he led the deployment of GPT-5 and the development of ChatGPT Agents.

Interestingly, QBitai notes that Tworek, born and raised in Poland with a master’s in mathematics from the University of Warsaw, didn’t jump straight into AI. He spent five years in Amsterdam as a quantitative researcher, developing futures trading strategies using optimization and signal-extraction techniques—work that ultimately steered him toward reinforcement learning.

As 36Kr highlights, Tworek’s departure continues a wave of high-profile exits at OpenAI—from Dario Amodei leaving to start Anthropic, to internal shake-ups involving Ilya Sutskever, and even the head of the safety team walking out. Yet the company is also attracting fresh talent: Lexica founder Sharif Shameem officially joined OpenAI on January 6. Lexica, a startup known for building next-gen creative tools powered by cutting-edge generative models, marks the latest addition to OpenAI’s incoming talent pool.

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(Photo credit: Jerry Tworek’s personal homepage)