When OpenAI leaders Nick Turley and Mark Chen talk about hiring, they don’t rattle off Ivy League credentials or AI competition wins.
Instead, they value something far more human: curiosity and initiative.
In a Tuesday episode of OpenAI’s podcast, Turley, the head of ChatGPT, said the single most important trait he looks for isn’t technical prowess, but curiosity.
“It’s the number one thing that I’ve looked for,” Turley said. “And it’s actually my advice to students when they ask me, ‘What do I do in this world where everything’s changing?'”
“There’s so much we don’t know,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of humility you have to have about building on this technology.”
He added that working with AI is less about knowing all the answers and more about asking the right questions.
“When it comes to working with AI,” he said, “It’s asking the right questions that is the bottleneck, not necessarily getting the answer.”
Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, echoed that sentiment.
He said he didn’t have much formal AI training when he joined the company in 2018.
“I also came into the company as a resident without much formal AI training,” he said. “Even on research, I think increasingly less, we index on you have to have a Ph.D. in AI.”
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Instead, Chen said OpenAI looks for candidates with “agency”—the ability to identify and solve problems independently.
“It’s really about being driven to find, ‘Hey, here’s the problem. No one else is fixing it. I’m just going to go dive in and fix it,'” he said.
That kind of self-direction is echoed by other OpenAI veterans.
Peter Deng, who served as OpenAI’s VP of consumer product and previously led product teams at Meta, put it bluntly on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast last month: “In six months, if I’m telling you what to do, I’ve hired the wrong person.”
That expectation aligns closely with OpenAI’s own culture of hands-on ownership.
Turley recalled that ChatGPT itself was born out of a hackathon-style sprint, with people from across teams — including infrastructure and supercomputing — coming together to ship a product quickly.
“Fundamentally,” Turley said, “we just have a lot of people with agency who can ship.”
He added that this is what makes OpenAI unique and is a key focus of the company’s hiring process.
