Max Kleiman-Weiner

Max Kleiman-Weiner is Co-Founder & CEO at Common Sense Machines, creating artificial intelligence that learns to build a 3D world model that enables human-level perception, prediction, and planning. He is also Scout Investor at Sequoia Capital.

I am a Harvard Data Science and CRCS Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard & MIT. My interests span the study of intelligence (natural), intelligence (artificial), and intelligence (moral). My goal is to understand how the human mind works with enough precision that it can be implemented on a computer. I also draw on insights from how people learn and think to engineer smarter and more human-like algorithms for artificial intelligence.

I primarily research social intelligence where the scale, scope, and sophistication of humans is distinct in the natural world and where even a kindergartener exceeds the social competence of our best AI systems.

I earned my PhD in Computational Cognitive Science from MIT, advised by Josh Tenenbaum, where I received fellowships from the Hertz Foundation and NSF. Previously, I was a Marshall Scholar in Statistics at Oxford advised by Tim Behrens, a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing with Scott Rozelle, and before that was an undergraduate at Stanford where I worked with John Huguenard. I was Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Diffeo which was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. We built a collaborative AI to help people find and fill gaps in their knowledge. I grew up in Santa Monica and outside of science, I enjoy surfing, skiing, and sushi.