EP 51 | OpenAI's Secret Weapon: The Engineer Behind Every Major Model

This episode features Weng Jiayi, the unsung hero behind every major OpenAI model from ChatGPT to GPT-5. A math prodigy who learned by direct intuition rather than calculation, he embraced a "future investment" philosophy, starting advanced studies early despite learning 2-3 times slower than peers.

Chapters:
00:00 Opening Hook
01:17 Chapter 1: From Math Prodigy to Competition Contestant.
02:29 Chapter 2: The Ups and Downs of OI Competition.
03:49 Chapter 3: The "Rebellion" at Tsinghua.
04:54 Chapter 4: The Awakening of Values.
05:49 Chapter 5: At the Eye of the AI Storm.
06:48 Chapter 6: The Philosophy Behind the Tech.
07:48 Conclusion: A Tribute to the Unsung Heroes.

At Tsinghua University, he created the THU-CST-Cracker project, open-sourcing all coursework to break information barriers. His impact-oriented mindset—viewing life's score as "how many remember your name"—led him to OpenAI in 2022.

Working on the failed WebGPT project, his team discovered that improving conversational experience through RLHF birthed ChatGPT. Weng Jiayi's three core contributions—Reinforcement Learning, Post-Training, and Infrastructure—pioneered new AI paradigms. His engineering-first approach, believing "whoever fixes more bugs trains better models," exemplifies how true innovation comes from those working quietly behind the scenes.