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Philipp Moritz

Philipp Moritz is a computer scientist and co-creator of Ray, the open-source framework that scales AI applications from a laptop to a cluster. He coauthored Trust Region Policy Optimization in 2015 and the Ray paper at OSDI in 2018. A UC Berkeley PhD in 2019 with a thesis on Ray, advised by Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica, led into the co-founding of Anyscale, the company built to develop and commercialize Ray. TRPO received an ICML 2025 Test of Time Honorable Mention, and Ray joined the PyTorch Foundation in October 2025. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Anyscale.

Now at
Anyscale
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Timeline

  1. 2015

    The TRPO algorithm

    He coauthors Trust Region Policy Optimization with John Schulman, Sergey Levine, Pieter Abbeel and Michael Jordan, published in the proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning in 2015. The paper describes a method for optimizing control policies with guaranteed monotonic improvement, effective for large nonlinear policies such as neural networks.

  2. 2017–2018

    Plasma and the Ray paper

    In August 2017, he and Robert Nishihara, both graduate students at UC Berkeley, describe Plasma, an in-memory object store first developed as part of Ray and moved to Apache Arrow. In 2018, he is first author of the Ray paper at the 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, with Nishihara, Michael I. Jordan, Ion Stoica and others.

  3. 2019

    A PhD thesis on Ray

    He completes his PhD in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley in 2019 with the thesis 'Ray: A Distributed Execution Engine for the Machine Learning Ecosystem', advised by Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica.

  4. 2019

    Co-founding Anyscale

    He co-founds Anyscale in 2019 with Robert Nishihara and Ion Stoica, along with Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan, to develop and commercialize Ray, which scales applications from a laptop to a cluster. In December 2019, the company announces a $20.6 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

  5. 2025

    A Test of Time mention

    Trust Region Policy Optimization, which he coauthored, receives a Test of Time Honorable Mention at ICML 2025.

  6. October 2025

    Ray joins PyTorch Foundation

    In October 2025, he, Robert Nishihara and Ion Stoica announce that Ray is joining the PyTorch Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. They report that downloads of Ray have grown nearly 10x over the past year.

  7. As of October 2026

    Anyscale co-founder and CTO

    He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Anyscale, the company he helped start in 2019.

Career

  1. Since 2019AnyscaleCo-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Education

  1. 2019University of California, BerkeleyPhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Philipp Moritz. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. 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 Anyscale. 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.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of California, Berkeley. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of California, Berkeley. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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  1. Trust Region Policy Optimization proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Plasma In-Memory Object Store | Apache Arrow arrow.apache.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications | USENIX usenix.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Ray: A Distributed Execution Engine for the Machine Learning Ecosystem | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Founders of Open Source Project Ray Launch Anyscale with $20.6M in Funding to Democratize Distributed Programming | Anyscale anyscale.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Ray is Joining The PyTorch Foundation anyscale.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2025 Awards icml.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Who is the CTO of Anyscale in 2026? Philipp Moritz's Bio | Clay clay.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Philipp Moritz - Co-founder and CTO at Anyscale | The Org theorg.com. Checked 22 October 2026.