Max Tegmark

Tegmark earned a B.A. in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and a B.Sc. in physics from the Royal Institute of Technology, then an M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. (1994) in physics from UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry. He then worked at the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich, became a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study in PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry from 1996, then taught at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry, and joined MIT in September 2004.⁠[1]

As first author with 36 collaborators, he submitted a paper measuring cosmological parameters from the three-dimensional power spectrum of over 200,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) combined with WMAP data; it appeared in Physical Review D, volume 69.⁠[2]

In 2006 he and Anthony Aguirre founded the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), an independent grant-making agency and think tank supporting “blue skies research” in the physical sciences, which has awarded more than $29 million in grants.⁠[3]

He posted the paper “The Mathematical Universe,” arguing from the External Reality Hypothesis that, with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH): that “our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure.”⁠[4]

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) was founded by its board members and held its launch event at MIT; in January 2015 it convened an AI conference in Puerto Rico and that year launched its first AI safety grant program.⁠[5]

In January 2017 FLI drafted the Asilomar AI Principles and in November released the short film Slaughterbots; in June 2018 it published an open letter declaring that “the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine.”⁠[5]

His TED talk “How to get empowered, not overpowered, by AI” was posted in June 2018. TED describes him as the author of the popular books Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0 and more than 200 technical papers.⁠[6]

He appeared on Lex Fridman’s show as the podcast’s first guest; titled “Life 3.0,” the episode introduced him as an MIT physics professor, co-founder of FLI and author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.⁠[7]

With Tufts researcher Meia Chita-Tegmark he founded the nonprofit Improve the News Foundation (ITN), where they serve as president and treasurer/secretary respectively; it runs the news site Verity, which uses machine learning to aggregate news from more than 5,000 sources before human editing.⁠[8]

He appeared on episode #155 as an MIT physicist and AI researcher, discussing AI and physics, whether AI can discover new laws of physics, AI safety, misinformation, autonomous weapons, consciousness and aliens.⁠[9]

FLI published an open letter stating, “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”; as of October 2026, the page showed 31,810 signatures.⁠[10]

On episode #371, “The Case for Halting AI Development,” he discussed the open letter to pause giant AI experiments, maintaining control, regulation, job automation, open source and nuclear winter.⁠[11]

TED posted his second talk, “How to keep AI under control,” in October 2023.⁠[6]

With Ziming Liu and others he co-authored “KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks,” proposing networks based on the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, with “learnable activation functions on edges,” as alternatives to multi-layer perceptrons.⁠[12]

FLI released its winter 2025 AI Safety Index rating eight major AI companies and finding their safety practices behind their public commitments. He said US AI companies “remain less regulated than restaurants” and continue lobbying against binding safety standards.⁠[13]

FLI launched an initiative calling for a prohibition on developing superintelligence until there is broad scientific consensus and public buy-in, signed by Yoshua BengioYoshua BengioYoshua Bengio is a professor of computer science at Université de Montréal, founder of Mila and a deep learning pioneer who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun; since 2023 he has turned to AI safety research, chairing the International AI Safety Report and founding the non-profit LawZero in 2025. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2018.Open the full entry, Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey HintonMachine learning researcher.Open the full entry, Steve WozniakSteve WozniakSteve Wozniak (born 1950), widely known as “Woz,” is an American engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He designed the Apple I and Apple II personal computers, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976, and received the National Medal of Technology with Jobs in 1985. He later founded or co-founded companies including CL 9, Woz U, Efforce and Privateer, and has long supported computer education in schools and sponsored technology museums.Open the full entry, Richard Branson and others. He said: “95% of Americans don’t want a race to superintelligence, and experts want to ban it.”⁠[14]

As of October 2026, the FLI-hosted Statement on Superintelligence page showed 77,963 signatures in total.⁠[15]

At MIT he researches AI and physics, with recent AI safety work on mechanistic interpretability and guaranteed safe AI; he has more than 300 publications, both Life 3.0 and Our Mathematical Universe were New York Times bestsellers, and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences gold medal, and was named to Time’s “100 Most Influential People in AI” 2023.⁠[16]

FLI’s people page lists him as Founder and Chair, with Anthony Aguirre as President and CEO, Jaan Tallinn and Victoria Krakovna as board members, and Meia Chita-Tegmark as Board Secretary.⁠[17]

Personal website: Public link: https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/tegmark (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

MIT: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Future of Life Institute: Official website: https://futureoflife.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

Foundational Questions Institute: Official website: https://fqxi.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Improve the News Foundation: Official website: https://www.improvethenews.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]