Noam Brown

Brown was born in Israel. From 2005 to 2009 he studied for a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science at Rutgers University, graduating summa cum laude as part of the Rutgers College Honors Program.⁠[1][2]

From 2006 to 2010, Brown worked as an algorithmic trading engineer at MJM Trading Group in New York. From 2010 to 2012 he was a research assistant in the International Financial Markets section of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, researching algorithmic trading in financial markets.⁠[2][2][3]

In 2012, Brown went to Carnegie Mellon University to work with Tuomas Sandholm, earning a master’s degree in robotics in 2014 before pursuing a PhD in computer science. During his doctoral studies, his poker programs took first place in both the No-Limit Texas Hold’em Instant Runoff and Total Bankroll events of the Annual Computer Poker Competition in 2014 and 2016.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

In the 20-day “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante” competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, Libratus, the AI developed by Brown and Sandholm, played four top professionals, Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, Daniel McAulay, and Jason Les, over 120,000 hands of heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em, and when play ended on January 30 it led by $1,766,250 in chips; the two developers said the victory was statistically significant and not simply a matter of luck. During the event, Libratus used the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges supercomputer each night to analyze the holes the professionals had found and patch the top three.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

Libratus consisted of three systems: one that developed a strategy by playing itself over trillions of hands for several months, one that refined that strategy in real time during play, and one that reviewed each day’s hands to find exploitable weaknesses. Because it did not learn by imitating humans, some of its tactics, such as dramatically raising small pots, began to change how professionals play. That year Brown and Sandholm published the Libratus paper in Science and won a NeurIPS 2017 Best Paper Award; Brown also interned at DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry in London that summer.⁠[1][1][1][2][2][2]

In 2018, Brown joined Facebook AI Research as a research scientist in New York, staying until 2023. The same year he received an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship, one of seven recipients.⁠[2][2]

In 2019, Brown and Sandholm published “Superhuman AI for Multiplayer Poker” in Science, describing Pluribus, a multiplayer program that defeated top humans in no-limit poker; the paper was a Science cover article, and Pluribus was one of nine runners-up for the journal’s Breakthrough of the Year. That year Libratus received the Marvin Minsky Medal for Outstanding Achievements in AI, and Brown was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35.⁠[2][3][2][3][2]

In 2020, Brown received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University; his dissertation won the university’s School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award, the AAAI ACM-SIGAI Dissertation Award, and the IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Dissertation Award.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Brown and colleagues on Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team developed CICERO, the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategy game Diplomacy, combining language models with strategic reasoning. The paper was published in Science in 2022, with Brown among its co-first authors.⁠[3][2][2]

In 2023, Brown joined OpenAI as a member of technical staff in San Francisco, working on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play, and multi-agent AI. He was a foundational contributor to reasoning models such as o1 (code-named “strawberry”) and is listed on OpenAI’s 2024 o1 System Card and 2025 GPT-5 System Card.⁠[2][3][3][2][2]

Brown invested as an angel in the first funding round of AI lab Conway ResearchConway ResearchConway Research is an artificial intelligence lab founded by Sigil Wen that works on efficient models, inference engines, and personal AI that runs on devices users already own; its first product is Underdog, a locally run personal assistant. In October 2026, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was leading the company’s first funding round.Open the full entry, completed in April 2026. The company’s founder, Sigil Wen, had coded alongside Brown and others while living in an AI hacker house in Silicon Valley.⁠[5][5][6][6]

Brown focuses on imperfect-information games. He argues that checkers, chess, and Go are “perfect information” games in which both sides know the full state of play, whereas games with hidden information such as poker cause past techniques to fall apart; since most real-world strategic interactions involve some hidden information, he envisions such research eventually applying to areas such as managing traffic, predicting market performance, and conducting national security negotiations.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Personal website: https://noambrown.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/polynoamial (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-brown-8b785b62 (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

OpenAI: Official website: https://openai.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]