Ahmed El-Kishky

You need to work logically.

You need to develop grits as you sort of like

At a dead end, I need to sort of like power through to sort of get something that's just isn't coming easy to you.

All that stuff makes for, you know, makes for great researchers, great thinkers, and, you know, the next generation of people that will discover the next big thing.

And so what I would tell, you know, college students is keep doing what you're doing.

If you look at, you know, our peers here at OpenAI, so many people were competitive programmers, competitive mathematicians.

And what I really see is they bring a unique way of thought.

And these unique, you know, ways of thinking are what lead to breakthroughs.

Whenever they see a problem, they're not like, oh, this is a problem.

It's impossible.

Their, you know, experiences tell them, hey, you know,

This is a problem.

Let's try different approaches, get some feedback, and then try to push through it.

And in fact, a lot of these people are incredibly excited by the ability to sort of piggyback on a powerful AI to solve even more difficult problems.

I'll give you an interesting, a funny story.

When we were training our models to...

be really good competitive programmers.

We had, you know, our two, you know, C-level researchers there, Mark Chen and Jakob Oczaki, the chief research officer and chief research scientist.

Mark Chen, like, coaches the US Olympiad team.

He takes them there, makes sure that they're ready to compete on the world stage.