PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Adam Tauman Kalai

Also known as A. Kalai, A.T. Kalai, Adam Kalai, Adam T. Kalai

Adam Tauman Kalai is a computer scientist whose research spans algorithms, AI safety, fairness, and language-model reliability. He earned degrees at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, completed an MIT postdoctoral fellowship, and held faculty roles at TTIC and Georgia Tech. From 2008 to 2023, he worked at Microsoft Research New England as a Senior Principal Researcher. His work included a 2024 study of chatbot fairness, a 2025 method for safer generative AI, and a 2026 Nature paper on language-model hallucinations. As of October 2026, he is a cofounder of RESI after leaving OpenAI’s Safety Systems team.

Now at
Institute for Responsible Superintelligence
Works
202
Citations
8,907
h-index
44
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1996–2001

    Degrees at Harvard and CMU

    He earns a BA from Harvard in 1996, an MA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998, and a PhD there in 2001 under Avrim Blum.

  2. 2001–2006

    MIT postdoc and TTIC faculty

    He holds an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with Santosh Vempala from 2001 to 2003. He then serves as an assistant professor at TTIC from 2003 to 2006.

  3. 2007–2008

    Georgia Tech and two awards

    He joins Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in August 2007. In 2008, he receives an NSF CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

  4. 2008–2023

    Research at Microsoft

    From 2008 to 2023, he works at Microsoft Research New England on code generation, fairness, algorithms, and game theory. He serves as a Senior Principal Researcher.

  5. 2024

    Fairness in chatbot responses

    In 2024, he coauthors a study of first-person fairness that measures potential bias linked to names in ChatGPT responses.

  6. November 2025

    Consensus sampling for safety

    In November 2025, he, Yael Tauman Kalai, and Or Zamir introduce consensus sampling, an architecture-agnostic method for improving safety by combining multiple generative models.

  7. April 2026

    Accuracy incentives and hallucinations

    In April 2026, he and three coauthors publish a Nature paper explaining how next-word prediction and accuracy-based evaluations reward unwarranted guessing.

  8. As of October 2026

    Cofounding RESI

    As of October 2026, he is a cofounder of the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence, which works to make superintelligence safe by design. He leaves OpenAI’s Safety Systems team to start the institute.

A language model matched the links in this timeline to people, organizations and papers (provisional, model-judged).

Career

  1. NowInstitute for Responsible SuperintelligenceCofounder
  2. 2024–2026OpenAI
  3. 2008–2023Microsoft ResearchSenior Principal Researcher
  4. 2008–2023Microsoft
  5. 2007–2008Georgia Institute of TechnologyAssistant Professor
  6. 2003–2006Toyota Technological Institute at ChicagoAssistant Professor
  7. 2001–2003Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPostdoctoral Fellow

Education

  1. 2001Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. 1998Carnegie Mellon UniversityMA
  3. 1996Harvard UniversityBA

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings2016 · 1,615 citationsWith James Zou
  2. Online convex optimization in the bandit setting: gradient descent without a gradient2004 · 599 citations
  3. Noise-tolerant learning, the parity problem, and the statistical query model2003 · Journal of the ACM · 596 citationsWith Avrim Blum
  4. Efficient algorithms for online decision problems2004 · Journal of Computer and System Sciences · 592 citations
  5. Bias in Bios2019 · 337 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. Google alumni founded or led 77 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Adam Tauman Kalai. We trace 177 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 186 career moves between the labs.
  2. 11 of 71 people shaping AI with a former OpenAI role now work at AnthropicIncludes Adam Tauman Kalai. Our estimates of where OpenAI recruits came from and where people with former OpenAI roles work now.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 33%Includes Microsoft. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 33% in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Adam Tauman Kalai yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Microsoft Research New England 10th Anniversary Symposium - Panel: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics microsoft.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Biographical Sketch: Dr. Adam Kalai web.mit.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. Santosh Vempala's home page faculty.cc.gatech.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. TTIC Faculty Alumni ttic.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. CoC Compiler - July 2006 sites.cc.gatech.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. College of Computing Faculty Distinctions | College of Computing cc.gatech.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. Adam Kalai | ASSISTments assistments.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. Adam Tauman Kalai kal.ai. Checked 18 October 2026.
  9. First-Person Fairness in Chatbots arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  10. Consensus Sampling for Safer Generative AI arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  11. Evaluating large language models for accuracy incentivizes hallucinations | Nature nature.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  12. RESI Overview resi.org. Checked 18 October 2026.