Jeff Clune

He received an honors B.A. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1999, an M.A. in philosophy from Michigan State University in 2005, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the same university in 2010.⁠[1]

From 2010 to 2012 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, and from 2012 to 2013 a visiting scientist in the same department.⁠[1]

He was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming from 2013 to 2017 and Harris Associate Professor from 2017 to 2019; during this period he received an NSF CAREER Award in 2015 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019.⁠[1]

From 2015 to 2016 he was a senior leader at the startup Geometric Intelligence; after Uber acquired the company, the team created Uber AI Labs, where he was a founding member and senior research manager from 2017 to 2019.⁠[1][2]

From 2020 to 2022 he served as a research team manager at OpenAI.⁠[1][2]

He joined the University of British Columbia as an associate professor of computer science in 2021 and has been a professor since 2024; since 2022 he has been a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and faculty member at the Vector Institute. The university’s computer science department lists his research area as artificial intelligence and machine learning.⁠[1][3]

From 2023 to 2025 he also served as a senior research advisor 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.⁠[1][2]

According to his CV, he has been a co-founder of Recursive since January 2026. An April 2026 Implicator.ai report citing the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry referred to the company as Recursive Superintelligence, said it was founded by Richard Socher with its legal home in London, and listed Clune among the publicly identified members of the founding team.⁠[1][4]

The AMMCS 2026 conference profile said his research focuses on deep learning, including deep reinforcement learning; his talk there covered quality diversity, open-ended, and “AI-generating algorithms,” and mentioned recent work including Automatically Designing Agentic Systems (ADAS), the Darwin Gödel Machine, and The AI Scientist.⁠[5]

University of British Columbia: Official website: https://www.ubc.ca/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Vector Institute: Official website: https://vectorinstitute.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Personal website: Public link: https://jeffclune.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]