Editorial illustration for Riley Walz, the ‘Jester of Silicon Valley,’ joins OpenAI’s OAI Labs team
OpenAI Reshapes AI Personality Research Team
Riley Walz, the ‘Jester of Silicon Valley,’ joins OpenAI’s OAI Labs team
Riley Walz has been called the Jester of Silicon Valley, a title earned through irreverent, wildly inventive web experiments that often feel more like pranks than products. Now he’s joining OpenAI. The company just hired him for OAI Labs, a secretive new team led by research leader Joanne Jang.
Their mandate? Inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI. This is not a vanity hire.
OpenAI is racing Google and Anthropic to redefine how we interact with models, and ChatGPT, already used by 800 million people weekly, isn’t the endgame. Developers are flocking to coding agents like Claude Code as their primary interface. With Walz, the company is betting on the next leap.
Now, Walz's skills creating novel web experiences will be put to use in OAI Labs, a relatively new team led by research leader Joanne Jang. The team is secretive about what it's been working on but has been tasked with "inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI," according to Jang. OpenAI has spent the past several years racing with Google and Anthropic to create new, compelling ways for people to use its AI models.
While ChatGPT has been a hit with consumers, now reaching more than 800 million people every week, the company is eyeing new interfaces to improve these experiences. The move comes as millions of developers have started using coding agents such as Claude Code as their main interface to access AI models. With hires like Walz, OpenAI hopes to get ahead of the next big AI product.
Riley Walz isn’t just another hire. He’s a signal. OpenAI is betting that the next great interface won’t emerge from a research paper, it will be built by someone who treats code like comedy.
The jester knows the court better than the king. And in a landscape where Claude Code is already rewriting how developers work, OpenAI needs more than a smarter model. It needs a new language for how we talk to machines.
Walz, with his track record of turning the web into a playground, might just write that language. OAI Labs remains cloaked in secrecy. But the move itself is loud: the future of AI isn’t just about reasoning, it’s about delight.
And if anyone can make delight feel like a punchline, it’s Silicon Valley’s jester. Let the games begin.
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Common Questions Answered
What changes are happening to OpenAI's Model Behavior team?
OpenAI is restructuring its 14-person Model Behavior team by integrating it into the Post Training team led by Max Schwarzer. The team's founding leader, Joanne Jang, is departing to establish OAI Labs, a new group focused on prototyping interfaces for human-AI collaboration.
What specific work did the Model Behavior team contribute to OpenAI's AI models?
The Model Behavior team has been influential in shaping AI systems including GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, and GPT-5. They addressed critical issues like sycophancy and political bias, helping to refine the personality and interaction capabilities of OpenAI's AI models.
What are Joanne Jang's goals for OAI Labs?
Joanne Jang aims to move beyond traditional companionship bots or autonomous agents, instead focusing on building AI as 'instruments for thinking, making, playing, doing, learning, and connecting'. Her vision is to create new interfaces that fundamentally transform how humans collaborate with artificial intelligence.
Further Reading
- Papers with Code Benchmarks — Papers with Code
- Chatbot Arena Leaderboard — LMSYS
