Paul Christiano - Wikipedia

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 American AI safety researcher 
 For the choreographer, see Paul Christiano (choreographer) . 
 

 Paul Christiano Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS)
 University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
 Known   for AI alignment 
 Reinforcement learning from human feedback 
 Scientific career Workplaces NIST 
 OpenAI 
 Alignment Research Center 
 Thesis Manipulation-resistant online learning   (2017) Doctoral advisor Umesh Vazirani 
 Website paulfchristiano .com 
 Paul Christiano is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on AI alignment , which is the subfield of AI safety research that aims to steer AI systems toward human interests. [ 1 ] He is the founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a nonprofit that develops methods for finding mechanistic explanations of neural network behavior, [ 2 ] and serves on the OpenAI Foundation's board and its Safety and Security Committee. [ 3 ] 

 Christiano worked at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021, where he led the language model alignment team [ 4 ] and became one of the principal architects of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). [ 5 ] [ 6 ] He founded ARC in 2021 [ 7 ] and in 2024 became Head of Safety for the U.S. AI Safety Institute (now the Center for AI Standards and Innovation) inside NIST , [ 8 ] before returning to ARC as executive director in August 2026. [ 2 ] He was also an initial trustee of Anthropic 's Long-Term Benefit Trust. [ 6 ] [ 9 ] In 2023, Christiano was named to the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI [ 5 ] [ 10 ] and appointed to the advisory board of the UK government's Frontier AI Taskforce. [ 11 ] 

 Education

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 Christiano attended the Harker School in San Jose, California. [ 12 ] He competed on the U.S. team and won a silver medal at the 49th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in 2008. [ 12 ] [ 13 ] 

 

 In 2012, Christiano graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in mathematics. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] At MIT, he researched data structures, quantum cryptography, and combinatorial optimization. [ 15 ] 

 

 He completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. [ 16 ] While at Berkeley, Christiano collaborated with researcher Katja Grace on AI Impacts, co-developing a preliminary methodology for comparing supercomputers to brains, using traversed edges per second (TEPS). [ 17 ] He also experimented with putting Carl Shulman 's donor lottery theory into practice, raising nearly $50,000 in a pool to be donated to a single charity. [ 18 ] 

 Career

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 At OpenAI, Christiano co-authored the paper "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences" (2017) and other works developing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). [ 19 ] [ 20 ] He is considered one of the principal architects of RLHF, [ 5 ] [ 6 ] which in 2017 was "considered a notable step forward in AI 

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