Jong Wook Kim is a member of technical staff at OpenAI, where Kim has worked since August 2019 on large-scale multimodal deep learning, including the CLIP, Jukebox and Whisper projects. Kim is the second author of the CLIP and Whisper papers, and as a maintainer of the openai/whisper repository announced the large-v3 and large-v3-turbo Whisper models.123456
At a glance
- Current role
- Member of technical staff (since August 2019)
- Company
- OpenAI
- Sector
- Company
- Work listed
- 3
- Sources cited
- 10
- Profile reviewed
Career
Kim worked as a software engineer at NCSOFT and then as a recommender system engineer and data scientist at Kakao, building distributed systems and Spark applications for recommendations. Kim later held research internships at Pandora in 2017 and Spotify in 2018.82
Kim joined OpenAI as a member of technical staff in August 2019. Kim's résumé describes developing and open-sourcing multimodal models such as Jukebox, CLIP and Whisper, building the Whisper API, and taking part in data engineering for GPT-4 with vision.82
Research
Kim's early research was in music information retrieval, including CREPE (2018), a convolutional model for pitch estimation. At OpenAI, Kim co-authored Jukebox (2020), a generative model for music.9810
Kim is second author of the CLIP paper (2021), which trains image and text encoders together from natural language supervision, and of the Whisper paper (2022), on speech recognition trained with large-scale weak supervision. In the Whisper repository, Kim announced large-v3 in 2023, which uses 128 Mel frequency bins, and large-v3-turbo in 2024, which reduces the decoder to 4 layers.3456
Work and contributions
CLIP ViT-L/14 Open weights
Second author, after Alec Radford, of the 2021 paper "Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision", which introduced CLIP.38
Whisper large-v3 Open weights
Second author of the Whisper paper, and posted the November 2023 announcement of the large-v3 model in the openai/whisper repository as a maintainer.45
Whisper large-v3-turbo Open weights
Posted the October 2024 announcement of large-v3-turbo, a version of large-v3 with 4 decoder layers instead of 32, in the openai/whisper repository as a maintainer.6
Timeline
- Began work as a software engineer at NCSOFT Corporation.8
- Joined Kakao as a recommender system engineer and data scientist.8
- Posted CREPE, a convolutional representation for pitch estimation, as first author.9
- Joined OpenAI as a member of technical staff.82
- Co-authored Jukebox, a generative model for music, at OpenAI.10
- Posted the CLIP paper as second author with Alec Radford and colleagues.3
- Posted the Whisper paper on large-scale weakly supervised speech recognition as second author.4
- Announced the Whisper large-v3 model in the openai/whisper repository.5
- Announced the Whisper large-v3-turbo model in the openai/whisper repository.6
Where they work
- OpenAI 63 people in the wiki
Related people
- Alec RadfordAlso at OpenAI
- Prafulla DhariwalAlso at OpenAI
- Aditya RameshAlso at OpenAI
- Mira MuratiAlso at OpenAI
- Ilya SutskeverAlso at OpenAI
- Xu TanSpeech and audio · Multimodal models
- Wei-Ning HsuSpeech and audio · Multimodal models
- Alexandre DéfossezSpeech and audio · Multimodal models
- Alexei BaevskiSpeech and audio · Multimodal models
- David HarwathSpeech and audio · Multimodal models
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References
10 sources · profile reviewed Oct 22, 2026 · data updated Oct 22, 2026
- Jong Wook Kim — homepage
- Jong Wook Kim — Bio
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (arXiv 2103.00020)
- Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (arXiv 2212.04356)
- openai/whisper discussion #1762: large-v3 release
- openai/whisper discussion #2363: turbo model release
- jongwook (Jong Wook Kim) on GitHub
- Jong Wook Kim — Résumé (July 2023)
- CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation (arXiv 1802.06182)
- Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music (arXiv 2005.00341)