About
 

Neil Thompson

Innovation Scholar, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Principal Research Scientist, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

Publications Research

Who they work with

Categories

Algorithms Artificial Intelligence Big Data Efficient AI

Neil C. Thompson is a principal research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he directs the FutureTech research project, and a principal investigator at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Thompson is also a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests include computer performance and economic outcomes, tools and innovation, patenting and licensing, and executing on innovation and strategy. Previously, he was an assistant professor of innovation and strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Innovation Science. Before joining academia, he worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Bain and Co., the United Nations, World Bank, and Canadian Parliament. He earned a BS in physics from Queen’s University, an MS in economics from the London School of Economics, and MS degrees in computer science and statistics, and a PhD in business and public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Selected Publications

  • Fleming, M., Li, W., & Thompson, N. C. (2024). The last mile problem in AI. Brookings Institution. 
  • Shnitzer, T., Ou, A., Silva, M., Soule, K., Sun, Y., Solomon, J., Thompson, N., & Yurochkin, M. (2024). Large language model routing with benchmark datasets. In Proceedings of the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).
  • Ho, A., Besiroglu, T., Erdil, E., Owen, D., Rahman, R., Guo, Z. C., Atkinson, D., Thompson, N., & Sevilla, J. (2024). Algorithmic progress in language models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37: Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (pp. 58245–58283).

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