PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Laurent Sifre

Laurent Sifre earned a Ph.D. at École Polytechnique and then co-authored research on game-playing AI at Google DeepMind. He is listed among the authors of the Nature papers on AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero and MuZero. He co-wrote the Chinchilla paper on compute-optimal language-model training, which NeurIPS 2022 named an Outstanding Paper. In 2023 he helped found H, a Paris AI company, and in June 2025 he and Charles Kantor, as co-founders, announced Gautier Cloix as its chief executive. As of October 2026, H's website names him as chair of the scientific committee.

Now at
H Company
Works
34
Citations
41,585
h-index
22

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Laurent Sifre

Timeline

  1. 2014

    A thesis on image scattering

    He completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at École Polytechnique in 2014, under Stéphane Mallat, with a thesis titled Rigid-Motion Scattering for Image Classification.

  2. January 2016

    A Go program in Nature

    He co-authored 'Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search', the AlphaGo paper published in Nature in January 2016 under a Google DeepMind affiliation.

  3. October 2017

    Learning Go without human knowledge

    He co-authored 'Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge', published in Nature in October 2017. A DeepMind post about AlphaGo Zero names him among the people who did the work.

  4. December 2020

    Planning with a learned model

    He co-authored the Nature paper 'Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model', published in December 2020, which describes MuZero.

  5. 2022

    Training compute-optimal language models

    He co-authored the Chinchilla paper, 'Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models', submitted to arXiv in March 2022. NeurIPS 2022 named the paper 'An empirical analysis of compute-optimal large language model training' an Outstanding Paper.

  6. 2023–2024

    Founding H in Paris

    H Company was founded in Paris in 2023 by Laurent Sifre, Charles Kantor and three DeepMind veterans. In May 2024 the firm secured a $220 million seed round.

  7. June 2025

    A new chief executive

    He and Charles Kantor, as H's co-founders, announce Gautier Cloix as the company's chief executive officer.

  8. As of October 2026

    Chairing the scientific committee

    H's website names him as Chair of the Scientific Committee, alongside Gautier Cloix as Chief Executive Officer.

Sources and credits

Photo: hcompany.ai; Our team | H; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: hcompany.ai. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Laurent Sifre - Chess Programming Wiki chessprogramming.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search | Nature nature.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge | Nature nature.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. AlphaGo Zero: Starting from scratch — Google DeepMind deepmind.google. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model | Nature nature.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [2203.15556] Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. NeurIPS 2022 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. H (company) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Governance Update | H hcompany.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. Our team | H hcompany.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.