Alec Radford

Alec Radford left Olin College in 2014 to work on Indico, a machine-learning startup begun in a dorm room with fellow students. With Luke Metz and Soumith Chintala of Facebook AI Research, Radford wrote the November 2015 DCGAN paper, whose convolutional generative adversarial networks produced plausible bedrooms and faces and showed that directions in the learned space could add or remove features such as glasses.

Radford joined OpenAI in 2016. A 2017 experiment trained a network only to predict the next character of Amazon reviews and found a single unit that tracked sentiment, a property no one had asked it to learn. In June 2018 Radford was lead author of "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training," the first GPT: a transformer pretrained on unlabeled books and then fine-tuned for each task. Radford was also first author of GPT-2 (2019), of CLIP (2021), which learned to match images with captions from 400 million web pairs, and of Whisper (2022), a speech recognizer trained on 680,000 hours of audio, and worked on DALL-E.

Radford left OpenAI in December 2024 to do independent research, was listed as an adviser to Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab from March 2025, and that year was subpoenaed in the authors' copyright case against OpenAI. In April 2026 Radford, Nick Levine and David Duvenaud released talkie, a 13-billion-parameter "vintage" language model trained only on 260 billion tokens of text published before 1931. They proposed such models as contamination-free tests of forecasting and invention, for example asking whether a model that has never seen a computer can learn to write Python, and planned a GPT-3-level version next.