Pavel Izmailov

photo of Pavel Izmailov

Contact: pi390@nyu.edu, Twitter

I am a Researcher at Anthropic. I am primarily interested in reinforcement learning, reasoning, AI for science and AI alignment.

Starting in Fall 2025, I will be joining NYU as an Assistant Professor in the Tandon CSE department, and Courant CS department by courtesy. I am also a member of the NYU CILVR Group.

Previously, I worked on reasoning and superintelligent AI alignment at OpenAI.

I am hiring PhD students to work with me at NYU starting Fall 2025. Please apply to the PhD program in the CSE department (deadline on December 1) or the CS department (deadline on December 12) and mention my name in your application. You are welcome to email me at pavel.recruiting@gmail.com with your CV and short description of your research interests. Admissions happen through a centralized committee.

Due to a high volume of applications, I will be unable to respond to all emails! Please do not be discouraged if you do not hear back from me.

My research interests are broadly in understanding how deep neural networks work. I am excited about a broad array of topics in core machine learning, including:

You can see some of my representative publications below.

Recent Highlights

I contributed to the recent OpenAI o1 models, a new state-of-the-art in LLM reasoning. Our work on weak-to-strong generalization was covered by a WIRED, MIT Technology Review and others. Our work on Bayesian model selection was recognized with an Outstanding Paper Award 🏆 at ICML 2022!

Links

Selected Papers