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Core Memory · 3 min · Dec 1, 2025

OpenAI says it could use 10 times more compute

Mark Chen · Chief Research Officer, OpenAI

Mark Chen says OpenAI could put 3× more compute to work immediately and 10× within weeks.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 8:16OpenAI funds exploration to find the next research paradigm6 min
  2. 59:58Pre-training still has room to scalePro pick 4 min
  3. 1:09:16OpenAI wants AI to conduct research end to endPro pick 6 min
  4. 1:33:49OpenAI avoids rewarding models for human-pleasing reasoning4 min
  5. 47:17Chen rallied OpenAI researchers during the leadership crisis3 min
  6. 1:15:25OpenAI says it could use 10 times more compute3 min
  7. 23:49Models bring different intuitions to research problems4 min
  8. 0:00OpenAI focuses recruiting on the people it most needs4 min
“if we had 3x to compute today, I could immediately utilize that very effectively.”
Mark Chenat 1:15:38 · Core Memory
1:15:38

Takeaways

  1. Chen says 3× more compute could be used immediately.
  2. 10× more could be used productively within a few weeks.
  3. He cites algorithmic advances and data efficiency as scaling advantages.

About this segment

Mark Chen says OpenAI could put 3× more compute to work immediately and 10× within weeks. He says algorithmic advances support scaling and points to data efficiency as a competitive edge.

Mark Chen

Mark Chen is chief research officer at OpenAI.

Led the teams behind DALL-E and Codex and visual perception in GPT-4, now oversees OpenAI's research.

  • Ashlee Vance, Host · CEO, Core Memory

    Wrote the best-selling biography Elon Musk; covered tech for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and The New York Times.

From “How OpenAI Shapes Its Research And What's Next - EP 46 Mark Chen”, Dec 1, 2025. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is there still a GPU shortage?” See all 35 answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:15:37

    which is, you know, when people ask me, like, do you guys really need all this compute? It's such a shocking question because day to day, I'm dealing with so many compute requests. And really my frame of mind is, if we had 3x to compute today, I could immediately utilize that very effectively. If we had 10x to compute today, probably within a small number. of weeks, fully utilize that productively. And so I think the demand for compute is really there. I don't, I don't see any slowdown and yeah, I, it almost baffles me when I hear people ask like, oh, do you guys really need more compute? Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to me. And you think we, in the broad strokes of the question I asked badly, um, do you like along the lines of where you guys seem very optimistic about what you've cracked on pre-training? Are

  2. 1:16:28

    Are you equally, not just like this demand that people want more GPUs, but do you see pretty clearly that the same thing, scaling is about to kick things higher? Yeah, we absolutely want to keep scaling the models. And I think we have algorithmic breakthroughs that enable us to scale the models. And I think there's a lot impressive about Gemini 3. One thing that kind of reading into the details that I've noticed is when you look at stuff like their sweet bench numbers there's still a big thing around data efficiency that they haven't cracked right they haven't made that much movement on it and i think we have very strong algorithms there yeah well and there was this leaked memo from i mean sam was sounding quite somber about gemini 3 man in this memo i'm trying to find the quote did you well you have i'm sure you got the

  3. 1:17:18

    memo um like it it it seemed like a bit of a moment um yeah well i do think part of sam's job is to inject urgency and pace and that's also part of my job as well um i think it is important for us to be laser focused on on scaling and i do think you know gemini 3 is exactly like the right kind of bet that that Google should be pursuing um yeah at the same time yeah I would calibrate that by saying you know a large part of our jobs is to inject as much urgency into the org as possible yeah and um it is a good model um I think we have a response um and I think we can execute