Sully F. Chen

Hi! I’m Sully. I’m a 25-year-old medical student at Duke University School of Medicine. I’m currently on leave working at OpenAI as a staff research scientist, where I work on developing fundamental methodologies for advancing image and text generation. I’m broadly interested in improving the standard of living and quality of care for all people through two main paths:

1. Developing highly specialized, domain-specific AI systems that directly impact clinical care and/or biomedical research. This is largely the focus of my academic research.
2. Working toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), which has already begun to tangibly reshape our world. I’m particularly hopeful that AGI will dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, tear down barriers and disparities in healthcare, and provide high quality, personalized education to all people.

My life path has been super unconventional, and as a result I get a lot of questions. Here’s a quick timeline/description of my life to help answer a few:

January 1999 - June 2017: I was born in Los Angeles in January 1999. I loved video games as a kid, which led me to learn C++ around the time I turned 10-years-old in hopes of becoming a video game developer. It turns out you need a lot of math to render graphics, so I learned most of what would be taught in undergraduate multivariable calculus as well as some linear algebra by the end of middle school. In high school, I became completely captivated by artificial intelligence – I was fascinated by the concept of “intelligence”, how it could be replicated by machines, and generally how complex behaviors could arise from simple-ish rules. My ultimate dream was to build a world where everyone could live a life of abundance, free from the burdens of disease, poverty, and labor. I did some open source work on self-driving cars and educational stuff near the end of high school, leading to some cool internship opportunities from Nvidia and Ultraleap.

June 2017 - May 2021: I ended up pursuing a degree in computer science at California Polytechnic University, but I dropped it after taking my first CS class (learning computer science for a grade, to me, kills the fun). I switched my major to mathematics, then wrote my what would have been my senior thesis in mathematics on analytical number theory during my freshman year, which was later published in a journal by the European Mathematical Society. I had a somewhat sporadic change of heart and decided to pursue medicine, so I transferred to the University of Southern California, where I majored in biochemistry.

August 2021 - December 2021: I got rejected from every medical school I applied to, so after graduating I pursued a post-baccalaureate fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where I worked on detecting sleep-apnea with smartphone sensors (this manuscript is actually still being written, maybe one day we’ll publish it). I also worked at Earthrise, where I helped develop image-processing algorithms that detect plastic waste dumps from satellite imagery (interactive tool here).

January 2022 - October 2023: I stayed at the NIH for about 4 months, when I was abruptly offered a full-time research position at OpenAI. I worked there for 7 months during which time I was also abruptly offered a spot at Duke University School of Medicine. I was so eager to start that I left my position at OpenAI to start medical school. I finished my preclinical year at Duke, as well as my anesthesia/surgery rotation, passed USMLE Step 1, before taking a research leave to return to OpenAI.

October 2023 - Present: I’m on research leave working at OpenAI :)