An Alien Mind

"An Alien Mind" is an essay published on OpenAI's website on September 6, 2026, written by Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist. It is a position piece rather than a model or product. It recounts how early reasoning-model results in 2023 (the "RLSlow" project) shaped OpenAI's view that machines meaningfully smarter than humans are likely within our lifetimes.

The essay argues that progress is driven largely by scaling compute, that modern AI is "grown more than designed," and that its behaviour is only partly understandable, much like neuroscience. Pachocki says internal results give him a strong expectation that the current speed of progress could be sustained into recursive self-improvement. He separates alignment into goal alignment and value alignment, and says the period calls for extreme caution.

He states that OpenAI will keep pursuing technical work on alignment and monitoring, build defensive systems, and unilaterally withhold further scaling as needed. He also argues that broader interventions are required, including stronger safeguards and international coordination. The essay is free to read on the OpenAI site; the scraped text was truncated, so later sections are not covered here.