PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nal Kalchbrenner

Nal Kalchbrenner is a researcher whose neural network work spans translation, image modeling and speech synthesis. In 2013, he and Phil Blunsom published Recurrent Continuous Translation Models. Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks, which he co-wrote with Aäron van den Oord, models the distribution of natural images and appeared at ICML in 2016. His University of Oxford PhD, completed in 2018, focused on encoder-decoder neural networks. He is a founding member of the technical team at Project Prometheus, an AI startup that Jeff Bezos co-founded.

Works
46
Citations
34,814
h-index
27

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2013

    Recurrent continuous translation models

    At the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, he and Phil Blunsom present Recurrent Continuous Translation Models.

  2. 2016

    Pixel recurrent neural networks

    Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks, which he co-writes with Aäron van den Oord, models the distribution of natural images and appears at ICML in 2016.

  3. 2016

    Neural machine translation in linear time

    Neural Machine Translation in Linear Time is an arXiv preprint from 2016 that he co-writes with Lasse Espeholt, Karen Simonyan, Aäron van den Oord, Alexander Graves and Koray Kavukcuoglu.

  4. 2018

    A PhD at Oxford

    At the University of Oxford in 2018, he completes a PhD with a dissertation titled Encoder-decoder neural networks.

  5. 2018

    Parallel WaveNet for speech

    Parallel WaveNet: Fast High-Fidelity Speech Synthesis, co-authored by him with Erich Elsen, Heiga Zen and others, appears in the 2018 proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning.

  6. Since 2025

    Project Prometheus technical team

    A former Google researcher, he is a founding member of the technical team at Project Prometheus, an AI startup that Jeff Bezos co-founded.

Sources and credits

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  1. Recurrent Continuous Translation Models - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford: Publication - Recurrent Continuous Translation Models cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. Pixel RNN research.google. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. [1601.06759] Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Neural Machine Translation in Linear Time research.google. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Nal Kalchbrenner - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Parallel WaveNet: Fast High-Fidelity Speech Synthesis proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Amazon-Gründer Jeff Bezos kehrt mit KI-Projekt Prometheus zurück retail-news.de. Checked 15 October 2026.