Durk Kingma is Co-Founder of OpenAI, a leading AI research organization that develops advanced AI models including ChatGPT and GPT. He is renowned for co-authoring the influential Adam optimizer and pioneering Variational Autoencoders (VAE).

Kingma earned a PhD (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam in 2017, focusing on deep learning and generative models under Max Welling. Before co-founding OpenAI in 2015, he co-founded Advanza, which was acquired in 2016.

Kingma received the 2024 ICLR Test of Time Award for his VAE paper and the 2019 Dutch Datascience Award from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences. His research contributions include Glow and Variational Diffusion Models.

At OpenAI (2015-2018), Kingma led the Algorithms team focused on basic research for generative AI models. He later joined Google Brain/DeepMind (2018-2024) where he led research projects on generative models for text, image, and video.

Kingma's Adam optimizer remains the most widely used optimization algorithm in AI a decade after publication. He joined Anthropic in 2024 to continue advancing responsible AI development.