Marcus Hutter

Marcus Hutter was born and raised in Munich.⁠[1]

By his own account, a 3D CAD program for 8-bit computers that he wrote in assembler in his final year of high school first brought him national attention; from 1996 to 2000 he developed medical software at BrainLAB.⁠[2]

He received his BSc and PhD in physics from LMU Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and a BSc, MSc and Habilitation in informatics from TU Munich (Technische Universität München).⁠[3]

On April 3, 2000, he posted the paper “A Theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence based on Algorithmic Complexity” on arXiv, combining sequential decision theory with Solomonoff’s theory of universal induction into a parameterless theory of universal artificial intelligence and proposing the AIXI model; the paper acknowledges that AIXI is uncomputable and constructs AIXI-tl, a time- and space-bounded variant.⁠[4]

From October 2000 to 2006 he was a senior researcher at IDSIA in Lugano, Switzerland; from 2006 to 2010 he was an associate professor at the Australian National University and a senior researcher at NICTA, becoming a full professor in 2011.⁠[2]

In 2005 Springer published his monograph “Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions based on Algorithmic Probability,” a book of about 300 pages that unifies sequential decision theory and universal prediction from an algorithmic information theory perspective into a theory of an optimal reinforcement learning agent acting in an arbitrary unknown environment.⁠[5]

In 2006 he launched the €50,000 Human Knowledge Compression Contest, widely known as the Hutter Prize, rewarding improvements in the lossless compression of a Wikipedia extract on the grounds that compressing well is closely related to acting intelligently.⁠[6]

In December 2007 he and Shane LeggShane LeggShane Legg is a New Zealand–born artificial intelligence researcher who co-founded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis in 2010 and is chief AGI scientist at Google DeepMind, with long-standing work on the theory of machine intelligence and the safety of artificial general intelligence.Open the full entry posted “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence” on arXiv, extracting the essential features of well-known informal definitions of human intelligence given by experts and formalising them mathematically into a general measure of intelligence applicable to machines.⁠[7]

In January 2011 he, Joel Veness, K. S. Ng, William Uther and David SilverDavid SilverDavid Silver is a computer scientist who led reinforcement learning research at DeepMind for many years, heading the AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero projects and co-leading AlphaStar. A professor at University College London and Fellow of the Royal Society, he left Google DeepMind in 2026 to focus on Ineffable Intelligence, the company he founded.Open the full entry published “A Monte-Carlo AIXI Approximation” in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, presenting the first computationally feasible approximation of AIXI by combining a new Monte Carlo tree search algorithm with an extension of the context tree weighting algorithm.⁠[8]

In April 2018 he and Tom Everitt won the $5,000 first prize in the second round of the AI Alignment Prize, funded by Paul Christiano, for the paper “The Alignment Problem for History-Based Bayesian Reinforcement Learners.”⁠[9]

In 2019 he moved to DeepMind in London.⁠[10]

In February 2020 he increased both the Hutter Prize task and its reward tenfold, moving from a 100 MB Wikipedia extract to a 1 GB file and raising the purse to €500,000; he explained that hardware had improved greatly and that he could now afford larger payouts.⁠[11]

On February 26, 2020, he appeared as the guest of episode 75 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, which introduced him as a senior research scientist at DeepMind and a professor at the Australian National University; the outline covers Occam’s razor, Solomonoff induction, Kolmogorov complexity, the definition of intelligence, AIXI, where rewards come from, Gödel machines and consciousness.⁠[12]

In 2021 Artemiy Margaritov, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh, received €9,000 for beating the previous Hutter Prize benchmark by 1.13%, a new milestone for the expanded prize.⁠[13]

In May 2024 Chapman & Hall published “An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence,” a book of about 500 pages he wrote with David Quarel and Elliot Catt that introduces late undergraduates to universal artificial intelligence theory, algorithms approximating AIXI and philosophical questions about super-intelligent agents.⁠[14]

The same month he discussed material from both books on The Cartesian Cafe podcast hosted by Timothy Nguyen, covering how to combine sequential prediction with action that maximises expected reward.⁠[15]

In 2026 he published “Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI” (AIXI Media, about 270 pages), a book for a general readership arguing that once artificial general intelligence and robotics decouple production from human labour, a transition to universal basic income or structurally adapted welfare is economically viable and desirable.⁠[16]

As of October 2026 he is a senior staff researcher at Google DeepMind in London and an honorary professor in the Research School of Computer Science (RSCS) at the Australian National University.⁠[10]

As of October 2026 the Hutter Prize had paid out €85,485 in total, and the latest record was set by Vladimir Ivanov on July 24, 2026.⁠[6]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.hutter1.net/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mhutter42 (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

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/hutter1/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

Google DeepMind: Official website: https://deepmind.google/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

Australian National University: Official website: https://www.anu.edu.au/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]