Dr. Jason Wei
AI Research Scientist
Sources checkedAI Research Scientist at OpenAI, previously at Google Brain. Inventor of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which revolutionized complex reasoning and mathematical problem-solving in foundation models. Co-authored foundational research on Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models and instruction tuning.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authored the seminal NeurIPS 2022 research paper demonstrating that generating intermediate reasoning steps dramatically boosts LLM performance on arithmetic, symbolic, and multi-hop reasoning tasks.
Chain-of-thought gains exhibit emergence only at significant model scale (~50B+ parameters); smaller models can generate superficially coherent rationales that lead to incorrect arithmetic conclusions.
Context: PaLM 540B, GPT-3 175B, GSM8K, SVAMP, BIG-bench reasoning tasks.
View missionEmergent Abilities of Large Language Models
Published the influential study demonstrating that certain capabilities (multi-step arithmetic, translation, symbolic reasoning) are not present in smaller models and emerge non-linearly only once compute and parameter scales cross critical thresholds.
Metric non-linearities (such as exact-string match versus continuous token log-likelihood) can exaggerate the appearance of abrupt phase transitions.
Context: Empirical analysis across PaLM, GPT-3, Gopher, Chinchilla, and LaMDA across dozens of benchmark evaluations.
View mission