Sébastien Bubeck is a prominent computer scientist and mathematician currently serving as the Vice President of Applied Research at Microsoft. Here’s a detailed overview of his career profile:

Current Role

• Position: Vice President of Applied Research

• Company: Microsoft

• Responsibilities: Bubeck leads the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research Redmond, focusing on foundational aspects of machine learning and the development of generative AI technologies.

Career Highlights

Microsoft Tenure:

Joined Microsoft in 2014 as a researcher and has since progressed through various roles, including Senior Researcher and Principal Research Manager.

His work has significantly contributed to advancements in machine learning, particularly in online learning, optimization, and deep neural networks.

Academic Background:

Prior to joining Microsoft, Bubeck was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University from 2011 to 2014, where he taught and conducted research in operations research and financial engineering.

Bubeck holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Lille 1 Sciences and Technology, with additional studies at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay.

He has also held positions as a visiting scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Research Contributions

Bubeck is known for his foundational work in areas such as:

• Online decision-making

• Convex optimization

• Adversarial robustness in machine learning

He has published extensively, with over 15,000 citations to his work. His notable contributions include algorithms for multi-armed bandit problems and the mathematical theory of neural networks.

Publications and Awards

He authored the book Convex Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity and has received multiple best paper awards at prestigious conferences like NeurIPS and COLT.

His recent research includes exploring the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, which he claims exhibit "sparks of artificial general intelligence."

Vision and Focus

Currently, Bubeck is focused on understanding how intelligence emerges in large language models and improving their capabilities. He advocates for a physics-based approach to artificial general intelligence (AGI), examining how different components of AI systems contribute to their overall behavior.

Sébastien Bubeck's leadership at Microsoft reflects a deep commitment to advancing the field of AI through rigorous research and innovative applications.