Who is Durk Kingma, Anthropic’s latest transfer from OpenAI?

Durk Kingma, a co-founder of OpenAI, announced today that he is joining Anthropic. In posts on X, he shared that he will work mostly remotely from the Netherlands but did not specify which team he will be part of or lead. When asked for a comment, an Anthropic spokesperson referred to Kingma’s posts.

I'll be working (mostly) from the Netherlands, but will visit the SF bay area as frequently as I can!

— Durk Kingma (@dpkingma) October 1, 2024

Kingma wrote, “Anthropic’s approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs; looking forward to contributing to Anthropic’s mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly. Can’t wait to work with their talented team, including a number of great ex-colleagues from OpenAI and Google, and tackle the challenges ahead!”

Who is Durk Kingma?

Durk Kingma, also known as Diederik P. Kingma, is a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He earned his Ph.D. cum laude in machine learning from the University of Amsterdam in 2017. His academic work, particularly in deep learning and generative models, has had a profound impact on the AI community.

Kingma is best known for co-developing several groundbreaking techniques in AI, including the Adam optimizer, a widely-used optimization algorithm in deep learning, and Variational Autoencoders (VAE), a type of generative model that enables unsupervised learning and has applications in image generation and other AI tasks. These contributions have become foundational tools in the development of generative AI models.

Durk Kingma, also known as Diederik P. Kingma, is a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning (Image credit)

Before his work at OpenAI, Kingma spent several years as a researcher at Google Brain, where he focused on innovations in machine learning and generative models. He played a pivotal role in the creation of influential AI systems such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, which have helped revolutionize text-to-image generation and natural language processing.

In 2015, Kingma co-founded OpenAI, a leading research organization in AI, where he led the algorithms team. However, in 2018, he transitioned to being a part-time angel investor and advisor to AI startups, and later rejoined Google Brain. After Google Brain’s merger with DeepMind in 2023, Kingma continued to contribute to cutting-edge AI research​.

Featured image credit: Anthropic