person
Eric Horvitz
Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft
Senior AI researcher and executive who helped frame Microsoft's Responsible AI policies. Chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on AI and signed the Statement on AI Risk.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer. Long publication record on probabilistic reasoning and AI ethics. Past AAAI president.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Senior MS executive role gives high tech-industry recognition. Less mainstream press.
vintage
Deep-learning rise
Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.
Microsoft Research from 1993; Chief Scientific Officer 2017. Career bridges into deep-learning era operationally.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Existential primacyendorses
Extinction/disempowerment risk overrides ordinary cost-benefitSignatory to the Statement on AI Risk.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Eric Horvitz's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.