creators

Max Tegmark: MIT physicist, Future of Life chair

Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT and co-founder and chair of the Future of Life Institute. He wrote Life 3.0 and Our Mathematical Universe.

Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist, born in Stockholm in 1967. He took a BA in economics at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1989 and a physics degree at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology the following year, then a PhD in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. He arrived at MIT in September 2004 and is a professor of physics there, working at the interface between physics, AI and neuroscience within the NSF AI institute IAIFI and MIT's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. His recent AI safety work is on mechanistic interpretability and guaranteed safe AI. He is the author of "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" (2014) and "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (2017), both New York Times bestsellers, the second on how advanced AI could reshape work, war and human identity. He co-founded the Future of Life Institute in March 2014 and is its founder and chair; Anthony Aguirre is president and chief executive. The institute organised the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments, an October 2025 statement calling for a prohibition on superintelligence, and in 2026 the Pro-Human AI Declaration, backed by more than 40 organisations.

Specialization

AI safety, mechanistic interpretability, existential risk, cosmology

Country

United States