Anthropic
OpenAI
Caltech
UC Berkeley
Tianle (Tim) LiMember of Technical Staff; Lead, Auto Research · Thinking Machines LabResearcher↗
Researcher · Founder
John Schulman
Thinking Machines LabCo-founder and Chief Scientist
Career & education
Current roleThinking Machines Lab2025-presentCo-founder and Chief Scientist
Thinking Machines Lab2025-presentEducation
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations218,804As of Nov 1, '26
citations+8,754Since last snapshot, Oct 1, '26
Selected contributions
Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
PPO improves an agent's behavior through repeated updates guided by trial and reward.
Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback
With Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang and others ·InstructGPT uses human feedback to train language models to follow instructions.
GPT-4 Technical Report
With OpenAI, Joshua Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agarwal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Florencia Leoni Aleman and others ·Reported GPT-4's capabilities, limitations and safety evaluations as a text-and-image input model.
References
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmsarxiv.org
Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms supports the anchored contribution. Original PPO paper and first-person interview checked, including ChatGPT leadership and language-model post-training. Personal site fetch timed out; no URL changes. Existing prose preserved.
- John Schulman — research interview and transcriptdwarkesh.com
John Schulman — research interview and transcript supports the anchored contribution. Original PPO paper and first-person interview checked, including ChatGPT leadership and language-model post-training. Personal site fetch timed out; no URL changes. Existing prose preserved.
Based on public sources. If accuracy is important, verify details using the links or references.
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Reviewed August 7, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
