Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1967 and moved to the United States after completing his education at the University of Bonn.⁠[1]

He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Hildesheim in 1988, and a master’s in 1993 and PhD in 1995 in informatics and statistics at the University of Bonn.⁠[2]

He was a research computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry from 1995 to 1998 and then taught there until 2003; in 2003 he became an associate professor at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, and from 2004 he directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.⁠[2]

In May 1999 a team led by him presented MINERVA, a second-generation tour-guide robot, at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation; it operated for two weeks in a SmithsonianSmithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry museum, interacted with thousands of people and traveled more than 44 km.⁠[3]

Probabilistic Robotics, co-written with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, was published by MIT Press in 2005, presenting techniques for perception and control under uncertainty on a single mathematical foundation.⁠[4]

Stanley, a driverless Volkswagen Touareg built by the Stanford Racing Team he led, completed the 132-mile Nevada desert course in 6 hours 53 minutes to win the DARPA Grand Challenge and its $2 million prize, ahead of Carnegie Mellon’s Sandstorm.⁠[5]

He called the race “the birth moment of the modern self-driving car”; Stanley was later displayed at the National Museum of American History.⁠[6]

On February 9, 2007, the National Academy of Engineering announced 64 new members, including him, honored for “contributions to probabilistic robotics, including mobile robot localization and mapping.”⁠[7]

In the DARPA Urban Challenge at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, Stanford’s Junior took second place and $1 million, behind Boss from Carnegie Mellon’s Tartan Racing.⁠[8]

In 2010, Larry PageLarry PageLarry Page is a computer scientist and co-founder of Google who helped develop PageRank. He previously served as chief executive of Google and Alphabet and remains an Alphabet director.Open the full entry recruited him to build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, leading to Zee.Aero, which later became Kittyhawk.⁠[9]

On October 9, 2010, as a Google Distinguished Engineer, he described Google’s self-driving car experiment in a blog post: a fleet of six Toyota Priuses and one Audi TT had logged more than 140,000 miles on California roads.⁠[10]

In fall 2011 he and Peter NorvigPeter NorvigPeter Norvig is an American computer scientist, former Director of Research at Google and head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, now a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford HAI, and co-author with Stuart Russell of the AI textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.Open the full entry offered a free online artificial intelligence course, which drew more than 58,000 sign-ups from over 175 countries before it began; participants received no Stanford credit but could earn a statement of accomplishment.⁠[11]

In January 2012, at the DLD conference in Munich, he announced he was giving up his tenured position to found Udacity, offering low-cost university-level courses to anyone online; its first courses included his “Programming a Robotic Car.” His online AI course had drawn 160,000 students.⁠[12]

In 2012, as a Google Fellow and vice president, he led Google X, whose projects included the self-driving car and Google Glass, calling Glass his ambition to “really do a moonshot-type project.”⁠[13]

In November 2012, at the first Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Awards at the National Portrait Gallery, he received the education award for innovations in online education.⁠[14]

In 2013, with fewer than 10 percent of initial enrollees completing courses, he called Udacity a “lousy product,” and said of a failed San Jose State University pilot using Udacity courses that the medium “is not a good fit” for those students.⁠[15]

In May 2013, Udacity and Georgia Tech announced a fully online master’s degree in computer science supported by AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry, costing less than $7,000, with a pilot planned for fall 2014.⁠[16]

In April 2016, he stepped down as Udacity’s CEO, succeeded by chief operating officer Vishal Makhijani, and stayed on full-time as president and chairman.⁠[17]

In July 2016, Udacity introduced a self-driving car engineer nanodegree lasting about a year, saying industry needed such talent.⁠[18]

He co-founded Cresta, which automates enterprise office functions, with Zayd Enam, Tim ShiTim ShiTim Shi (Tianlin Shi) is an artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur who worked on web agents in OpenAI’s early days, co-founded the conversational AI company Cresta in 2017 and served as its CTO, and later co-founded Recursive Superintelligence.Open the full entry and Andre Esteva, and serves as its chairman.⁠[19]

On December 21, 2019, he appeared on episode 59 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 “Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education,” discussing the DARPA challenges, autonomous driving, Udacity’s self-driving car nanodegree, AI in medicine, and Kitty Hawk and flying cars.⁠[20]

Kittyhawk, which he founded and led, built 111 aircraft and completed more than 25,000 flights; in late 2019 its two-seat autonomous air taxi Cora was spun off into Wisk, a joint venture with Boeing, and in June 2020 it ended the single-seat Flyer program to focus on Heaviside. On September 21, 2022, Kittyhawk announced it would wind down.⁠[21]

On May 20, 2024, Accenture announced it had completed its acquisition of Udacity, founded in 2011 and having served more than 21 million registered learners in 195 countries, adding over 230 people to Accenture LearnVantage.⁠[22]

As of August 2026, he was building Dulo, a startup in stealth whose website says it develops “foundation models for hardware design”; at the Actuate robotics conference he said he was not yet speaking about the company.⁠[23]

His personal page describes him as an adjunct professor at Stanford and former tenured professor of computer science, and lists his founding of Project Chauffeur (later renamed Waymo) and Google X and his co-founding of Google BrainGoogle BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry.⁠[24]

Personal website: Public link: https://robots.stanford.edu (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

Cresta: Official website: https://cresta.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Udacity: Official website: https://www.udacity.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]