Harvard Physicist Xi Yin Announces Departure From OpenAI After About Five Months, Says He Will Explore New Directions
San Francisco, California — Xi Yin, a professor of physics at Harvard University, announced in a post on X on November 3 that the day was his last at OpenAI, saying he had decided to end the journey early and explore new directions, without disclosing his next move.
In the post, Yin thanked OpenAI researchers Alex Lupsasca, Boris Alexeev and Dan Roberts. Reports that Yin had left academia to join OpenAI first surfaced in late May this year, in what he described as his first corporate job. While at OpenAI he continued working at the intersection of super intelligence (SI) and theoretical physics; in October he spoke at Kyoto University under a Harvard University/OpenAI affiliation on SI-assisted research in string theory and quantum field theory, including a new numerical method for computing high-genus string amplitudes.
Born in December 1983, Yin entered the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996, went to Harvard in 2001 for his doctorate, and received his PhD in 2006. He joined Harvard's physics faculty in 2008 as an assistant professor, later became an associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 2015 at age 31, becoming one of the youngest Chinese full professors in Harvard's history. His main research areas are string theory and quantum gravity, and in December 2016 he was named a recipient of the 2017 Breakthrough Prize's New Horizons in Physics Prize.
A day before reports of Yin's move emerged, another Chinese scholar, Weijie Su, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, also announced he was joining OpenAI. Yin has not announced where he will go next; Harvard's physics department website still lists him as a professor in the department.
Source: Xi Yin
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：哈佛大学物理系所在的 Jefferson Laboratory（马萨诸塞州 Cambridge）。CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Jefferson Laboratory, home of Harvard's physics department, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
