PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Sébastien Bubeck

Sébastien Bubeck is a mathematician and AI researcher whose work spans optimization, neural network robustness, and language models. He grew up near Strasbourg, earned mathematics degrees in France, completed postdoctoral work in Barcelona, and became an assistant professor at Princeton. At Microsoft, he served as Vice President of Microsoft GenAI, led the Machine Learning Foundations group, and studied GPT-4 with collaborators. He received a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship; his papers won NeurIPS awards in 2018 and 2021, and he coauthored Microsoft's Phi-4 technical report. In August 2026, he served as Technical Staff at OpenAI and joined a forum discussion about AI and mathematics.

Now at
OpenAI
Works
184
Citations
12,734
h-index
42

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Sébastien Bubeck

Timeline

  1. Before 2015

    From Strasbourg to Princeton

    He grew up near Strasbourg and studied mathematics in France. He earned an MS in mathematics at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and a PhD at Lille 1, then completed a postdoctoral year in Barcelona before becoming an assistant professor at Princeton.

  2. 2015

    A fellowship in computer science

    He received the Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science.

  3. 2018

    A paper on network optimization

    He worked as a senior researcher in Microsoft Research's Machine Learning and Optimization group. His paper with Kevin Scaman, Francis Bach, Laurent Massoulié, and Yin Tat Lee won a NeurIPS Best Paper Award.

  4. 2021

    Explaining neural network size

    With Mark Sellke, he received a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award for a theory that explains why state-of-the-art deep networks require many more parameters than smoothly fitting their training data would require.

  5. March 2023

    Leading an AI foundations group

    He led Microsoft Research's Machine Learning Foundations group in Redmond as Vice President of Microsoft GenAI. With collaborators, he evaluated GPT-4 during development and published findings on the model's capabilities and limits.

  6. December 2024

    Building Phi-4

    He coauthored the Phi-4 Technical Report, which presents a 14-billion-parameter language model built with a focus on data quality and synthetic data.

  7. August 2026

    AI and mathematics at OpenAI

    He served as Technical Staff at OpenAI and joined mathematicians in a forum conversation on how AI could reshape mathematical research and education.

Sources and credits

Photo: King of Hearts, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Sebastien Bubeck simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Chasing convex bodies and other random topics with Dr. Sébastien Bubeck - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Awards neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Announcing the NeurIPS 2021 Award Recipients – NeurIPS Blog blog.neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. AI Frontiers: The Physics of AI with Sébastien Bubeck - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Phi-4 Technical Report - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. AI and the Future of Mathematics - Video | OpenAI Forum forum.openai.com. Checked 14 October 2026.