William Saunders

William Saunders has worked as a research engineer at OpenAI since February 2021, researching how to make AI systems understand human values and behave accordingly. William previously worked as a software engineer at Ought from May 2019 to July 2020. Prior to this, they were an intern at the Future of Humanity Institute from March to July 2017 and a software engineer at Google from September 2015 to January 2017. Saunders also worked as a research assistant at the University of Waterloo in 2012 and 2010 and as a server software developer at Amplex A/S and a speech scientist at Nuance Communications for a brief period in 2011. William also served as the national IT director at Students Offering Support in May 2009.

William Saunders received their high school education from Waterloo Collegiate Institute between 2003 and 2008. William started their higher education at the University of Waterloo in 2008 and obtained their Bachelor of Computer Science in Computer Science in 2013. Subsequently, they pursued a Master of Mathematics in Computer Science (Human Computer Interaction) from the same university between 2013 and 2015. Later on, they attended the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2021 for Additional Graduate Study in Machine Learning under the field of Computer Science.