Jan Leike (born ) is an

AI alignment In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered ''aligned'' if it advances the intended objectives. A '' ...

researcher who has worked at

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Go ...

and

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

. He joined

Anthropic Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded in 2021. Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. According to the ...

in May 2024.

Education

Jan Leike obtained his undergraduate degree from the

University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially ), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (), is a public university, public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The university was founded in 1 ...

in Germany. After earning a master's degree in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, he pursued a PhD in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

at the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public university, public research university and member of the Group of Eight (Australian universities), Group of Eight, located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton, A ...

under the supervision of Marcus Hutter.

Career

Leike made a six-month postdoctoral fellowship at the

Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Oxford investigating big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects. It was founded in 2005 as part of the Faculty of Philosophy and t ...

before joining DeepMind to focus on empirical AI safety research, where he collaborated with Shane Legg.

OpenAI

In 2021, Leike joined OpenAI. In June 2023, he and

Ilya Sutskever Ilya Sutskever (; born 8 December 1986) is an Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-inv ...

became the co-leaders of the newly introduced "superalignment" project, which aimed to determine how to align future artificial superintelligences within four years to ensure their safety. This project involved automating AI alignment research using relatively advanced AI systems. At the time, Sutskever was OpenAI's Chief Scientist, and Leike was the Head of Alignment. Leike was featured in Time's list of the 100 most influential personalities in AI, both in 2023 and in 2024. In May 2024, Leike announced his resignation from OpenAI, following the departure of Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Kokotajlo and several other AI safety employees from the company. Leike wrote that "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products", and that he "gradually lost trust" in OpenAI's leadership. In May 2024, Leike joined

, an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees.

References

External links

Official website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Leike, Jan Machine learning researchers Australian National University alumni Living people 1980s births 21st-century German scientists OpenAI people Anthropic people