Biography:David Duvenaud

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David Duvenaud
Born1983
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Education
Known for
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Vector Institute
Anthropic
ThesisAutomatic Model Construction with Gaussian Processes (2014)
Doctoral advisor
Websitewww.cs.toronto.edu/~duvenaud

David Kristjanson Duvenaud (born 1983) is a Canadian computer scientist at the University of Toronto specializing in probabilistic machine learning, generative AI, and AI safety.[1] He is a CIFAR AI chair since 2021[2] and a Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society since 2024.[3]

Education

Duvenaud was born in suburban Winnipeg, Manitoba.[4][5] He received his B.Sc. in computer science from University of Manitoba in 2006 and his M.Sc. in computer science from University of British Columbia in 2010 under the supervision of Kevin P. Murphy. He received his PhD under the supervision of Carl Rasmussen and Zoubin Ghahramani from Cambridge University in 2014. After a postdoc at Harvard University in the group of Ryan P. Adams, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 2016.[6]

Career and Research

Duvenaud is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a founding faculty member at the Vector Institute.[7]. His research group initially focused on deep generative models, including work on generative models of molecules[8] and neural ordinary differential equations, including a kind of continuous-time normalizing flow,[9] for which his group received the NeurIPS best paper award in 2018.[10][11]

In 2023, in response to growing concern from the widespread adoption of large language models, he pivoted his research into AI safety and did a sabbatical at Anthropic. There he led the Alignment Evaluations team, doing work on jailbreaks[12] and developing evaluations for models' ability to surreptitiously conduct sabotage.[13] His more recent work on AI safety has focused on concerns around "gradual disempowerment",[14][15][16] the thesis that as artificial intelligence becomes more capable, the large-scale societal systems humans depend on—such as economies, cultures, and states—may progressively cease to serve human interests, because the alignment of these systems with human needs has historically depended on their reliance on human participation, which AI increasingly renders unnecessary.

References

  1. ↑ Hemmadi, Murad (2025-03-10). "Ottawa shakes up AI advisory group with star researchers and big companies" (in en-US). https://thelogic.co/news/ai-safety-regulation-canada-government/. 
  2. ↑ "David Duvenaud" (in en-US). https://cifar.ca/bios/david-duvenaud/. 
  3. ↑ "David Lie appointed Director of SRI; David Duvenaud and Roger Grosse appointed Schwartz Reisman Chairs in Technology and Society" (in en-US). https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/news/sri-leadership-team-welcomes-david-lie-david-duvenaud-roger-grosse. 
  4. ↑ "Finally, a way to halt Canada’s ‘brain drain’" (in en-ca). The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/growth/finally-a-way-to-halt-canadas-brain-drain/article35631591/. 
  5. ↑ "The chosen few: We asked Canada’s business leaders to nominate the brightest minds you’ve never heard of" (in en-GB). The Globe and Mail. 2019-02-25. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/article-the-chosen-few-we-asked-canadas-business-leaders-to-nominate-the/. 
  6. ↑ "DAVID DUVENAUD CV" Retrieved on 18 April 2026.
  7. ↑ Daly, John; Silcoff, Sean; Semeniuk, Ivan; O'Kane, Josh. "The Chosen Few: We Asked Canada's Business Leaders to Nominate the Next Generation". The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/article-the-chosen-few-we-asked-canadas-business-leaders-to-nominate-the/. 
  8. ↑ Duvenaud, David; Maclaurin, Dougal; Aguilera-Iparraguirre, Jorge; Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael; Hirzel, Timothy; Aspuru-Guzik, Alán; Adams, Ryan P. (2015). "Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28: 2224–2232. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2015/hash/f9be311e65d81a9ad8150a60844bb94c-Abstract.html. 
  9. ↑ Chen, Ricky T. Q.; Rubanova, Yulia; Bettencourt, Jesse; Duvenaud, David (2018). "Neural Ordinary Differential Equations". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31: 6572–6583. 
  10. ↑ "Best Paper Award – NeurIPS 2018". https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Awards. 
  11. ↑ Hao, Karen (12 December 2018). "A Radical New Neural Network Design Could Overcome Big Challenges in AI". MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/1739/a-radical-new-neural-network-design-could-overcome-big-challenges-in-ai/. 
  12. ↑ Anil, Cem; Durmus, Esin; Panickssery, Nina; Sharma, Mrinank; Benton, Joe (2024). "Many-shot Jailbreaking". https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/hash/ea456e232efb72d261715e33ce25f208-Abstract-Conference.html. 
  13. ↑ Benton, Joe; Wagner, Misha; Christiansen, Eric; Anil, Cem; Perez, Ethan; Srivastav, Jai; Durmus, Esin; Ganguli, Deep; Kravec, Shauna; Shlegeris, Buck; Kaplan, Jared; Karnofsky, Holden; Hubinger, Evan; Grosse, Roger; Bowman, Samuel R.; Duvenaud, David (2024-10-28). "Sabotage Evaluations for Frontier Models". arXiv:2410.21514 [cs.LG].
  14. ↑ Kulveit, Jan; Douglas, Raymond; Ammann, Nora; Turan, Deger; Krueger, David; Duvenaud, David. "Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development". https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/. 
  15. ↑ Kulveit, Jan; Douglas, Raymond; Ammann, Nora; Turan, Deger; Krueger, David; Duvenaud, David (29 January 2025). "Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development". arXiv:2501.16946 [cs.CY].
  16. ↑ Duvenaud, David (4 May 2025). "The Big Idea: Can We Stop AI Making Humans Obsolete?". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete. 



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