PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Niladri Chatterji

Also known as Niladri S. Chatterji

Niladri Chatterji is a machine learning researcher whose work spans interpolating models, language model evaluation and scaling laws. After graduating from IIT Bombay in 2015, he earned a PhD at UC Berkeley in 2021 under Peter Bartlett and then spent 2021 to 2023 as a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford's SAIL group with Tatsunori Hashimoto and Percy Liang. He coauthored the foundation-models report in 2021, the HELM benchmark in 2022 and, in 2023, a paper on proving test set contamination in black-box language models that earned an honorable mention at ICLR 2024. He worked on the Llama team at Meta Gen AI and coauthored a Findings of ACL 2025 paper showing that compute-optimal scaling laws depend on the skill measured. He is now at OpenAI.

Now at
OpenAI
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Timeline

  1. 2015

    Degrees from IIT Bombay

    He graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2015 with BTech and MTech degrees. His undergraduate degree is in Engineering Physics.

  2. April 2020

    Interpolating linear classifiers

    In April 2020, he and Philip M. Long post a finite-sample analysis of interpolating linear classifiers in the overparameterized regime. Their bounds show that the maximum margin algorithm, trained on noisy data with sufficient over-parameterization, can achieve nearly optimal population risk.

  3. 2021

    A Berkeley PhD with Bartlett

    He completes his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2021, advised by Peter Bartlett.

  4. 2021–2023

    A Stanford SAIL postdoc

    He joins Stanford's computer science department as a SAIL postdoctoral researcher from 2021 to 2023, co-advised by Tatsunori Hashimoto and Percy Liang. His work there spans statistical learning theory, optimization and online learning.

  5. 2021–2022

    Foundation models and HELM

    He is one of the authors of On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models, posted in August 2021, a report on models such as BERT, DALL-E and GPT-3. In November 2022, he is among the authors of Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM), which evaluates 30 prominent language models on 42 scenarios.

  6. 2024

    ICLR 2024 honorable mention

    He is a coauthor, with Yonatan Oren, Nicole Meister, Faisal Ladhak and Tatsunori Hashimoto, of Proving Test Set Contamination in Black-Box Language Models, posted to arXiv in October 2023. The paper gives a statistical test that detects benchmark contamination without access to pretraining data or model weights, and an audit of five popular public language models finds little evidence of pervasive contamination. It receives an honorable mention at ICLR 2024.

  7. 2025

    Skill-dependent scaling laws

    He is a coauthor, with Nicholas Roberts, Sharan Narang, Mike Lewis and Dieuwke Hupkes, of Compute Optimal Scaling of Skills: Knowledge vs Reasoning, published in Findings of ACL 2025. The paper shows that compute-optimal scaling laws are skill-dependent, with knowledge-based question answering and code generation behaving differently.

  8. As of October 2026

    From Meta to OpenAI

    After his 2023 postdoc, he becomes a senior research scientist on the Llama team at Meta Gen AI, and then moves to OpenAI.

Career

  1. NowOpenAI
  2. 2021–2023Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral Researcher
  3. MetaSenior Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2021University of California, BerkeleyPhD
  2. 2015IIT BombayBTech and MTech

From the biography.

  1. 22 of 133 people shaping AI with a former OpenAI role now work at AnthropicIncludes Niladri Chatterji. Our estimates of where OpenAI recruits came from and where 133 people with former OpenAI roles work now, including the companies and labs they founded.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Niladri Chatterji. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Niladri Chatterji. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  4. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes OpenAI. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Niladri Chatterji yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Niladri Chatterji niladri-chatterji.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Niladri Chatterji | ISL Colloquium isl.stanford.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Finite-sample Analysis of Interpolating Linear Classifiers in the Overparameterized Regime arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Tatsunori Hashimoto | Home thashim.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Percy Liang cs.stanford.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Holistic Evaluation of Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. ICLR 2024 Awards iclr.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Proving Test Set Contamination in Black Box Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Niladri S. Chatterji - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.