OpenAI Researcher Behind GPT-4o Departs to Launch New Startup

Alexis Conneau, lead researcher at OpenAI and key figure behind GPT-4o, has left the company to launch his own AI startup. “After an amazing journey at @OpenAI building #Her, I’ve decided to start a new company,” Conneau posted on X, teasing that more details are coming soon. He also invited those interested in “building something #magical” to reach out, noting that his new venture is hiring.

When asked about the timeline for AGI, Conneau responded, “I’m more after general emotional intelligence! (AGEI?).”

OpenAI released GPT-4o at its latest Spring Update event, which won hearts with its ‘omni’ capabilities across text, vision, and audio. OpenAI’s demos, which included a real-time translator, a coding assistant, an AI tutor, a friendly companion, a poet, and a singer, soon became the talk of the town.

Prior to working at OpenAI, Conneau’s career has been closely associated with Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He completed his Ph.D. as a resident student at FAIR Paris and subsequently worked as a research scientist at Facebook AI. 

His research interests encompass deep learning for natural language processing, transferable text representations using neural networks, natural language understanding, sequence-to-sequence learning, neural machine translation, and cross-lingual understanding for low-resource languages.

Throughout his career, Conneau has made significant contributions to the field of NLP. 

He is known for his work on unsupervised alignment of word and sentence representations across multiple languages, which has contributed to advancements in unsupervised machine translation. 

Some of his notable projects include InferSent, MUSE (Multilingual Unsupervised and Supervised Embeddings), XNLI (Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference dataset), and XLM (Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining).

He received his educational foundation in mathematics and computer science, earning a B.S. and Master of Applied Mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique, followed by a master’s degree in vision and machine learning from ENS Cachan and ENSAE. Conneau completed his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Le Mans University in 2019.

In 2014, he spent six months as a research intern in machine learning at Capital Fund Management, a hedge fund management company. The following year, in 2015, he completed another six-month research internship at Criteo, focusing on personalised retargeting.