Marcus Hutter
Marcus Hutter is a German computer scientist, professor and artificial intelligence researcher. As a senior researcher at DeepMind, he studies the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence.
Hutter studied physics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2000 he joined Jürgen Schmidhuber's group at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Manno, Switzerland. He developed a mathematical formalism of artificial general intelligence named AIXI. He has served as a professor at the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Research
Starting in 2000, Hutter developed and published a mathematical theory of artificial general intelligence, AIXI, based on idealised intelligent agents and reward-motivated reinforcement learning. His first book Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability was published in 2005 by Springer. Also in 2005, Hutter published with his doctoral student Shane Legg an intelligence test for artificial intelligence devices. In 2009, Hutter developed and published the theory of feature reinforcement learning. In 2014, Lattimore and Hutter published an asymptotically optimal extension of the AIXI agent.An accessible podcast with Lex Fridman about his theory of Universal AI appeared in 2021 and a more technical follow-up with Tim Nguyen in 2024 in the Cartesian Cafe. His new book also gives a more accessible introduction to Universal AI and progress in the 20 years since his first book, including a chapter on ASI safety, which featured as a keynote at the inaugural workshop on AI safety in Sydney.