Nisan Stiennon
2022 Postdoc Fellow

Nisan earned his PhD in mathematics at Stanford in 2013, in the field of algebraic topology. He was a software engineer at Google (2014–2018) where he did ML engineering on YouTube’s recommendation system. In 2018 he joined OpenAI’s Alignment team, training language models including GPT-3 to summarize articles and even entire books using human feedback. Starting in 2021 he focused on game theory and theoretical computer science, funded by a grant and a summer research fellowship from the Center on Long-Term Risk. His research seeks to understand the notions of cooperation, competition, and bargaining between agents both human and artificial. Nisan will carry out his work at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley.