Peter Norvig

After earning a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics at Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry, he was an assistant professor at the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry in 1985–1986, research faculty at 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 in 1986–1991, a senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Labs in 1991–1994, chief designer at Harlequin in 1994–1996 and chief scientist at Junglee in 1996–1998.⁠[1]

During this period he wrote Paradigms of AI Programming, which teaches AI programming through Common Lisp case studies, and later released the book’s Lisp source code as open-source freeware.⁠[2]

He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 under advisor Robert Wilensky, with the dissertation “A Unified Theory of Inference for Text Understanding.”⁠[3]

The dissertation was issued in 1987 as technical report UCB/CSD-87-339; it proposed a unified approach to inference implemented in the FAUSTUS program, recognizing six general classes of inference and representing knowledge in the KODIAK language.⁠[4]

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the textbook he co-wrote with Stuart Russell, first appeared in 1995, followed by second to fourth editions in 2003, 2009 and 2020, with translations into French, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and other languages.⁠[5]

He headed the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center as NASA’s senior computer scientist and received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001.⁠[6]

In August 1998, Amazon.comAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry announced it would acquire Junglee, a Sunnyvale, California, developer of database technology for online product search, issuing about 1.6 million shares, and said all of Junglee’s founders would stay with the company.⁠[7]

His team at NASA Ames created the first autonomous software to command a spacecraft.⁠[8]

The software, Remote Agent, took control of the Deep Space 1 spacecraft for three days in May 1999, detecting, diagnosing and fixing problems on its own, and that year shared NASA’s Software of the Year award with Genoa.⁠[9]

He recounted that after one too many bad presentations at a meeting in January 2000, he turned the Gettysburg Address into a PowerPoint deck and posted it on his website; Edward Tufte called it “the trump card of subversive and ironic PP productions,” and its yearly views totaled 1,678,000 by 2007.⁠[10]

In the essay “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years,” he argued that developing expertise in many fields takes about ten years of deliberate practice, and that books promising results in 21 days cannot make anyone a truly expert programmer.⁠[11]

He was Google’s Director of Search Quality from 2002 to 2005 and became its Director of Research in 2005.⁠[6]

In January 2007, the Association for Computing Machinery named him one of 41 new Fellows for contributions to artificial intelligence and information retrieval.⁠[12]

With Alon Halevy and Fernando Pereira he published an article in the March/April 2009 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems arguing that researchers should embrace real-world complexity and use large amounts of data as their main resource rather than seek extremely elegant theories.⁠[13]

At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium during MIT’s 150th anniversary in 2011, Noam Chomsky criticized machine-learning research using purely statistical methods; he responded in an essay arguing that “probabilistic models are our best tool for representing facts about language.”⁠[14]

He and Sebastian ThrunSebastian ThrunSebastian Thrun is a German-born computer scientist and entrepreneur who led the Stanford team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, led Google’s self-driving car project and Google X, and founded the online education company Udacity.Open the full entry offered a free online version of the Stanford course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” running from September 26 to December 16, 2011, with the same materials, assignments and exams as the campus course.⁠[15]

The course enrolled 160,000 students and helped launch the wave of massive open online courses.⁠[6]

On April 16, 2012, Udacity opened CS212, “The Design of Computer Programs,” taught by him to help students learn to identify elegant solutions to problems.⁠[16]

In April 2013, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Google described him as “a hands-on scientist who writes his own code.”⁠[17]

On September 30, 2019, he appeared on episode 42 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, titled “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” discussing the textbook, explainable AI, online education, learning to program, Lisp and Python, and the early days of Google Search.⁠[18]

In fall 2021, he stepped back from his day-to-day role at Google and joined the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence as a Distinguished Education Fellow, developing tools and materials to explain the key concepts of AI while remaining affiliated with Google.⁠[19]

He said the most pressing questions in AI are human-centered: “Exactly what do you want to optimize? Whose interests are you serving?”⁠[8]

With Alfred Spector, Chris Wiggins and Jeannette M. Wing he co-wrote Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities, published by Cambridge University Press and organized around a seven-element analysis rubric ranging from data gathering to ethics; Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry announced a planned publication date of February 2023.⁠[20]

In October 2023, he and Blaise Agüera y Arcas published “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here” in Noema; Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis wrote a rebuttal arguing that “there is zero justification for claiming that the current technology has achieved general intelligence.”⁠[21]

His résumé states that he lives in Palo Alto, California, and is married with two children.⁠[1]

A Jio Institute faculty page lists him as Director of Research at Google and a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford HAI.⁠[22]

Personal website: Public link: https://norvig.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Official website: https://hai.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Google: Official website: https://about.google/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]