Michael Osborne

Michael Osborne (born 1982) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science.

In 2016 he co-founded Mind Foundry, an artificial intelligence company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts.

Osborne suffered from long COVID syndrome. He is an advocate for masking to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID disease.

He has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in both Pure Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Australia. He has a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford.

Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications, and his work has received over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 46 according to Google Scholar. and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding.

His career has focused in particular on Bayesian approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician Thomas Bayes. Osborne's work has contributed to Probabilistic numerics, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject.

In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?". The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage.

In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence". His testimony received significant coverage around his warnings of the threat of "rogue AI".

He is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College, a Fellow of the ELLIS society, and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He joined the Oxford Martin School as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015. He is a Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.