OpenAI's o1: The Full List of Names Behind the Reasoning Model

OpenAI has published the full list of contributors behind o1, its model focused on reasoning, and the roster reads like a who’s who of the company’s technical talent. The acknowledgments, released today, break contributors into tiers—Foundational Contributors, Core Contributors, and Contributors—alongside dedicated safety and leadership sections. Jerry Tworek and Jakub Pachocki are listed under overall leadership for the project, while Barret Zoph, Mark Chen, and Tal Broda are credited with organizational executive leadership. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman also appear under executive leadership.

The list confirms that Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist who departed the company earlier this year, contributed as a foundational researcher. Other notable names in the foundational tier include Noam Brown, known for his work on AI in games like poker and Diplomacy, and Hyung Won Chung. The safety section is equally detailed, naming Boaz Barak, Eric Wallace, and Tejal Patwardhan among the o1 Safety Leads, with Aleksander Madry and Lilian Weng overseeing safety leadership. A separate internal red teaming group credits Karina Nguyen and Wojciech Zaremba.

The contributor list spans hundreds of people, from research scientists to program managers like Lauren Yang and Mianna Chen. It also acknowledges the broader infrastructure that made o1 possible, specifically thanking Microsoft Azure for training infrastructure and the Bing and safety teams for deployment partnerships. The document further highlights the role of external adversarial testers and red teamers who evaluated the model at early stages, though it pointedly notes their participation is not an endorsement of deployment.

What’s striking is the sheer scale of the operation. This isn’t a small skunkworks project; it’s a massive, company-wide effort that touches nearly every team, including the executive assistants, finance, HR, legal, and recruiting departments, all of whom get a nod in the closing acknowledgments. The detailed breakdown provides a rare transparency into the organizational muscle behind a flagship model, showing exactly how many people and partners it takes to move a research project from concept to a safely deployed system.