Harvard University
Eric MitchellMember of Technical Staff · OpenAIResearcher↗
Researcher · Academic
Long Ouyang
OpenAIResearch Scientist
Long Ouyang helped develop a way to teach language models to follow instructions using human-written examples and ratings.[1] He was the first-listed co-author of the InstructGPT paper, whose training method OpenAI used for the original ChatGPT.[2] He also led the collection of data used to teach GPT-4 to follow instructions.[3]
Career & education
Current roleOpenAI2019-presentResearch Scientist
OpenAI2019-presentPreviously
Stanford University2015-2016Postdoc
Stanford University2015-2016Work 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.
citations71,986As of Jun 15, '26
citations+29,522Since last snapshot, Aug 25, '25
Selected contributions
Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback
With Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal 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
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackarxiv.org
Ouyang is the first-listed equal contributor. The paper describes training with human demonstrations and response rankings.
- Introducing ChatGPTopenai.com
OpenAI says the original ChatGPT used the same training method as InstructGPT, with changes to data collection.
- GPT-4 contributionsopenai.com
OpenAI credits Ouyang as lead for collecting instruction-following data.
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Reviewed August 10, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
