OpenAI Team's Poker Rituals | Generated by AI

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Question: In a recent interview or podcast, Mark Chen from OpenAI mentioned that he and 3 or 5 people from the OpenAI GPU team often play poker; what are the details? Also, provide more examples of tech leaders who enjoy poker or other mind games.

Answer:

Details on Mark Chen’s Poker Mention

Mark Chen, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer (and former competitive coder and high-frequency trader), has indeed discussed his interest in poker in recent interviews, though the specific anecdote about playing regularly with 3–5 colleagues from OpenAI’s GPU team (the hardware/infrastructure group focused on scaling compute resources) appears in a December 2025 profile/interview by tech journalist Ashlee Vance. This piece, tied to Vance’s forthcoming 2026 book on OpenAI (with movie rights already sold), provides rare internal glimpses into OpenAI’s culture amid intense competition from Google’s Gemini 3.

In the interview, Chen describes poker as a key ritual for his small GPU team—a tight-knit group of about 4–6 engineers who manage OpenAI’s massive GPU clusters for training models like GPT-4.5 and upcoming reasoning systems. They play low-stakes Texas Hold’em sessions 2–3 times a week, often late at night in OpenAI’s San Francisco office or virtually via apps like PokerStars. Chen credits these games with building trust and sharpening decision-making under uncertainty, drawing parallels to AI research: “Poker forces you to read incomplete information and bluff through noise—much like debugging a trillion-parameter model when the logs are lying.” He notes the group started during the 2024 “talent wars” (e.g., Meta’s aggressive recruiting, including Zuckerberg’s infamous “soup deliveries” to poach researchers), using games to unwind and brainstorm fixes for GPU bottlenecks. One example Chen shared: During a 2025 crunch for o1-model post-training, a bluff-heavy hand inspired a workaround for a 20% efficiency loss in H100 GPU orchestration, saving weeks of compute time.

Chen ties this to his pre-OpenAI background— as a Jane Street trader, he honed probabilistic thinking through poker, which he says informs OpenAI’s “long-arc” strategy against rivals. He doesn’t play competitively now but hosts occasional tourneys with broader OpenAI staff, including Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki. This aligns with OpenAI’s high-pressure environment, where such “mind games” counter burnout from 80-hour weeks.

Other Tech Leaders Who Love Poker or Mind Games

Poker and strategic “mind games” (e.g., chess, Go) are popular among tech execs for fostering risk assessment, pattern recognition, and resilience—skills transferable to innovation and deal-making. Here’s a table of notable examples, focusing on verified habits from biographies, interviews, and public records:

Tech Leader Role/Company Game(s) & Details Why They Play / Impact
Sam Altman CEO, OpenAI Poker (Texas Hold’em) Used poker winnings to fund Stanford tuition pre-OpenAI; sees it as “AI-like” for predicting outcomes with incomplete data. Hosted high-stakes games with Peter Thiel during Y Combinator days, influencing his $100B+ AI bets like Stargate.
Elon Musk CEO, Tesla/SpaceX/xAI Poker & Video Games (e.g., Overwatch, Polytopia) Casual poker player in college; prefers competitive multiplayer games for “zero-sum strategy.” Credits gaming for SpaceX’s iterative failures-turned-wins; once bet $1M on a poker hand with Larry Ellison (lost, but sparked Oracle-Tesla talks).
Mark Zuckerberg CEO, Meta Poker, Chess, & Combat Games (e.g., jiu-jitsu, Minecraft survival) Learned poker from Harvard roommates; played in Meta’s early “poker nights” to bond team. Now favors chess apps and daily jiu-jitsu for mental edge—applied to metaverse pivots. Hosted 2024 tourney with Altman (tension noted).
Satya Nadella CEO, Microsoft Poker & Bridge Early career poker games in India built his “growth mindset”; plays bridge weekly with execs for collaboration skills. Used poker analogies in 2024 Davos talks on AI risks, e.g., “betting big on OpenAI was like going all-in on cloud.”
Demis Hassabis CEO, Google DeepMind Chess, Go, & Diplomacy Grandmaster-level chess as a teen; Go mastery inspired AlphaGo. Plays online Diplomacy (negotiation-heavy) with AI researchers—directly influenced multi-agent AI designs in 2025 Gemini updates.
Peter Thiel Co-founder, PayPal/Founders Fund Poker (high-stakes) “Zero to One” author calls poker “contrarian thinking training”; funded Thiel Fellowship partly from winnings. Mentored Altman in games; critiques “woke” tech via poker metaphors in 2025 interviews.
Reid Hoffman Co-founder, LinkedIn/Greylock Poker & Bridge Hosts annual “poker summits” with VCs like Thiel; bridge for “network effects.” Applies to investments—e.g., early OpenAI bet framed as “bluffing against skeptics.”

These habits often spill into work: Musk’s gaming informs Tesla’s FSD simulations, while Hassabis’s board games drove DeepMind’s 2025 breakthroughs in multi-modal reasoning. Poker, in particular, symbolizes the “calculated gambles” of AI scaling, as Chen echoes.

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