Sébastien Bubeck

I work on AI at OpenAI.

Prior to this I was VP AI and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, spending 10 years in Microsoft Research (first joining the Theory Group), and before that I spent 3 years as an assistant professor at Princeton University. In the first 15 years of my career I mostly worked on convex optimization, online algorithms and adversarial robustness in machine learning, and received several best paper awards for these works (STOC 2023, NeurIPS 2018 and 2021 best paper, ALT 2018 and 2023 best student paper in joint work with MSR interns, COLT 2016 best paper, and COLT 2009 best student paper).

I am now more focused on understanding how intelligence emerges in large language models, and how to use this understanding to improve LLMs’ intelligence, possibly towards building AGI. We call our approach “Physics of AGI”, as we try to uncover at different scales (parameters, neurons, group of neurons, layers, data curriculum, …) how the parts of the system come together to create the striking and unexpected behavior of these models. A good starting point to learn more is this video and this one.

Notable coverage:

• GeekWire, October 2024, AI Dreams: Microsoft @ 50, Chapter 1

• The Information, October 2024, Prominent Microsoft AI Researcher to Join OpenAI

• Bloomberg Intelligence (podcast), July 2024, Microsoft Reducing AI Compute Requirements with Small Language Models

• MIT Technology Review, July 2024, What is AI?

• Wall Street Journal, July 2024 For AI Giants, Smaller Is Sometimes Better

• Wired, May 2024, Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing

• New York Times, April 2024, Microsoft Makes a New Push Into Smaller A.I. Systems

• New York Times, March 2024, Why Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Leans on A.I. Research From Microsoft

• Scientific American, November 2023, When It Comes to AI Models, Bigger Isn’t Always Better

• Quanta magazine, November 2023, Researchers Refute a Widespread Belief About Online Algorithms

• This American Life (podcast), June 2023, First Contact

• New York Times, May 2023, Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning

• Wired, April 2023, Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage

• Quanta magazine, February 2022, Computer Scientists Prove Why Bigger Neural Networks Do Better