Wojciech Zaremba lives in San Francisco but was born in 1988 in Kluczbork. In high school, he won competitions in math, IT, chemistry, and physics. At the age of 16, he built a lab in his cellar, and at 19, he won a silver medal at the 48th International Mathematical Olympiad in Vietnam as Poland’s representative. He soon began studying math and IT at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique in Paris, completing internships at NVIDIA, Google Brain, and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research. During his time at Google, he co-authored work on adversarial attacks against neural networks, which later became a distinct field of research. In 2012, he earned master’s degrees in both math and IT and started doctoral studies at New York University.
In 2015, he was one of the founders of OpenAI, now the world’s most famous research lab specializing in artificial intelligence (AI). Other co-founders, who contributed a total of one billion dollars, included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. However, OpenAI was primarily the work of three brilliant minds: Elon Musk (now the richest man on Earth and founder of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink), Sam Altman (entrepreneur, investor, and OpenAI CEO), and 25-year-old Wojciech Zaremba.
In 2015, Wojciech received the Google Ph.D. Fellowship award, and in 2016, he obtained a Ph.D. from New York University after completing his doctoral studies in just 2.5 years—half the typical duration. His dissertation, “Learning Algorithms from Data,” focused on matching neural network capabilities to algorithmic computing power. Training neural networks to represent programmable algorithms later became an independent research field. That same year, he moved to San Francisco.
In 2017, he was listed among the most skilled young Poles in “30 Under 30” by the Polish edition of Forbes. The following year, Elon Musk left OpenAI to avoid a potential conflict of interest with Tesla, which was also developing AI. Zaremba, however, continued playing a key role at OpenAI, leading research in robotics, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (Codex project), which ultimately led to the creation of ChatGPT.
In an interview with Forbes, he said: “Artificial intelligence has the potential to change practically every aspect of our lives, similar to electricity. Before its invention, it was hard to imagine its applications. Some thought it could only illuminate rooms, but no one expected it would lead to the creation of radio or computers. Today, electricity is everywhere, and the same will happen with AI.”
In 2019, he helped establish OpenAI LP, a commercial company aimed at advancing General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). That same year, he was included in MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” for applying machine learning to train robots. In 2022, he won the Leaders of the Future award from Forbes.
Undoubtedly, OpenAI’s most famous project, co-authored by Zaremba, is ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an AI-powered chatbot capable of generating texts on any topic with natural language fluency. It is most effective in American English but also functions in numerous other languages and dialects with varying accuracy. It generates human-like responses, allowing users to refine and steer conversations toward a desired length, format, style, or level of detail. It can compose essays, reports, stories, and fairy tales. It can also write and debug code, compose music, answer test questions, generate ideas, write poems and songs, translate and summarize texts, emulate Linux, simulate chat rooms, and play simple games like tic-tac-toe. Since May 2024, it has been capable of analyzing and generating images and sound.
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, and by January 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, reaching over 100 million users in just two months and significantly increasing OpenAI’s valuation—now estimated at around $90 billion. Its release triggered competition from rival AI chatbots, including Gemini (Google), Copilot (Microsoft), Llama (Meta), Grok (X, formerly Twitter), Claude (Anthropic), and Ernie (Baidu, also known as the “Chinese Google”). In May 2024, OpenAI partnered with Apple Inc., integrating ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence. By mid-July 2024, ChatGPT’s website ranked 11th among the world’s most-visited sites, with over 3 billion visits—on par with Amazon, WhatsApp, and Yahoo.
In December 2024, OpenAI released its most advanced version, ChatGPT o-1, designed to solve more complex problems by taking additional time to “think” before responding, improving analysis and strategy generation. The company also launched ChatGPT Pro, an o-1 model with enhanced voice functionality, available via a $200 monthly subscription.
Zaremba published his first article, “Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks,” at just 23. To date, he has authored over 40 papers on machine learning and artificial intelligence, with thousands of citations. OpenAI now employs over a dozen Poles, forming one of the company’s largest national contingents.In a Forbes interview, he emphasized: “OpenAI’s mission is to develop general artificial intelligence while ensuring AI remains beneficial, not destructive, to humanity. AI will be the most important invention of our time, as it will enable the mass production of goods and assist in programming, education, medicine, inventions, and all intellectual pursuits.”
