An Alien Mind

Essay by OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki on openai.com, announced on X on Sept 6, 2026 (x.com/merettm/status/2096630018495377464: why he's "concerned about the next few years" and the choices needed "to keep the future in humanity's hands"). He argues internal results give him a strong expectation that OpenAI's pace could be sustained into recursive self-improvement; that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed much longer; that voluntary slowdowns should become common until shared safety bars exist; and that chain-of-thought monitoring is getting less reliable. It distinguishes goal alignment from value alignment and calls for international coordination and third-party enforcement. It appeared between the Astra launch and the Navier-Stokes claim. Discussed by Zvi Mowshowitz (thezvi.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/an-alien-mind-jakub-pachocki-warns-us/), Unite.AI and others. openai.com is 403 to fetchers; content verified via Zvi's quotes and press.

Archive: openai.com returns 403 to scripts, but the Wayback snapshot https://web.archive.org/web/20260928213008/https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/ was read on 2026-09-29. It confirms the byline (Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist), the date (September 6, 2026) and the sections "Intellect we don't fully understand", "Teaching machines to love", "Monitoring generalization", "Scalable defense", "Pacing RSI" and "What is next?". The opening recalls the mid-2023 "RLSlow" project results that convinced him machines meaningfully smarter than humans would arrive within his lifetime.

"no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer"

"This is a time that calls for extreme caution"