About

I am a researcher at OpenAI working on safe and ethical AI under Alex Beutel.

Previously, I worked at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA, from its founding in 2008 to 2023 on various fun problems including code generation, fairness, algorithms, translating whale communication, game theory, computer humor, crowdsourcing, and many other things. Before that, I served as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and TTI-Chicago.

Recent works include:

• Kalai, A., Kalai, Y., and Zamir, O. Consensus Sampling for Safer Generative AI. arXiv:2511.09493, 2025. Accepted for presentation at IASEAI ’26 (non-archival).
• Kalai, A., Nachum, O., Vempala, S., and Zhang, E. Evaluating large language models for accuracy incentivizes hallucinations. Nature, 2026.
• Eloundou, T., Beutel, A., Robinson, D., Gu, K., Brakman, A., Mishkin, P., Shah, M., Heidecke, J., Weng, L., and Kalai, A. First-Person Fairness in Chatbots. ICLR 2025.

Students & Teaching

Previous students and interns: Jake Abernethy (Berkeley→Georgia Tech), Gati Aher (Olin College→CMU), Daniel Alabi (Harvard→UIUC), Ken Arnold (Harvard→Calvin), Maria De-Arteaga (CMU→ESADE), Pranjal Awasthi (CMU→Google), Nina Balcan (CMU→CMU), Harry Bovik (CMU→CMU), Maddy Bowers (MIT), Danielle Bragg (UW→MSR), Elisa Celis (UW→Yale), Myra Cheng (Caltech→Stanford), Mirac Suzgun (Stanford), Eric Zelikman (Stanford→Humans&), Konstantina Christakopoulou (UMN→Google DeepMind), Brittany Fiore-Gartland (UW→Tableau), Abie Flaxman (CMU→UW), Vikas Garg (MIT→Aalto), Tom Heffernan (Shrewsbury HS→Colorado College), Varun Kanade (Georgia Tech→Oxford), Ashwin Kalyan (Georgia Tech→AI2), Linyi Li (UIUC), Katrina Ligett (CMU→Hebrew University), Azarakhsh Malekian (UMD→Toronto), Brendan McMahan (CMU→Google Research), Aditya Menon (UCSD→Google), Ankur Moitra (MIT→MIT), Claire Monteleoni (MIT→CU Boulder/INRIA), Peter Organisciak (UIUC→Denver), Alexey Romanov (UMASS Lowell→Microsoft), Aaron Roth (CMU→Penn), Tal Schuster (MIT→Google DeepMind), Nathaniel Swinger (Lexington HS→UW), Omer Tamuz (Weizmann→Caltech), Jason Tsay (CMU→IBM), Shubham Tulsiani (IIT→CMU), Duru Turkoglu (U. Chicago→DePaul), Shyam Upadhyay (UIUC→Google DeepMind), Greg Valiant (Berkeley→OpenAI/Stanford), Sofia Vempala (Midtown HS→GA Tech), Elad Verbin (Tel Aviv University→Lunar), Ellen Vitercik (CMU→Stanford), Allison Wang (Mission San Jose HS), Shih-Yu Wang (MIT), Miaomiao Wen (CMU→Coursera), Gabriel Wickline (Melrose HS→UMass Amherst), and Kuat Yessenov (MIT→Google).

• Spring 2008: Game Theory and Computer Science, Georgia Tech
• Fall 2006: Machine Learning Theory, Weizmann Institute
• Autumn 2004: Online Algorithms, University of Chicago

Service

I’ve chaired and co-chaired a number of conferences and meetings including NEML (New England Machine Learning Day), HCOMP (Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing), and COLT (Conference on Learning Theory).

Short Biography

Adam Tauman Kalai is a Research Scientist at OpenAI, specializing in AI safety and ethics. His research interests also include algorithms, fairness, AI theory, game theory, and crowdsourcing. Adam earned his BA from Harvard University and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, after which he served as an Assistant Professor at TTIC and Georgia Tech and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. He is also a member of Project CETI’s science team. His work has been recognized by test of time and best paper awards, an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and most notably the Majulook Prize.