# Yannic Kilcher

> Yannic Kilcher is a Swiss machine learning researcher, video creator, and co-founder and CTO of DeepJudge. After computer science studies in Basel and a PhD at ETH Zürich, he built a YouTube channel devoted to close readings of AI research papers, helped lead the volunteer OpenAssistant effort, and now develops tools to search legal organizations’ knowledge.

- **Role:** CTO and co-founder at DeepJudge
- **Organizations:** DeepJudge, ETH Zürich, Google AI Language, OpenAssistant
- **From:** Laufen, Switzerland
- **Nationality:** Swiss
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Basel, Master of Science in Computer Science, ETH Zürich, PhD; dissertation: Navigating the Latent Spaces of Deep Neural Networks using Adversarial Techniques, ETH Zürich
- **Known for:** Co-founded DeepJudge in 2021 and leads its product and technical development as CTO., Earned a PhD in machine learning at ETH Zürich in 2021., Built a YouTube channel focused on detailed explanations of machine learning papers and research news.

## Career timeline

- **2015-2021** — Pursued doctoral research at ETH Zürich on neural networks, including adversarial techniques and generative models.
- **2017** — Began posting machine learning paper explanations on YouTube, initially with little audience.
- **2018-2019** — Completed two six-month Google internships, according to his doctoral CV.
- **2021** — Completed his ETH Zürich PhD and co-founded DeepJudge with Paulina Grnarova and Kevin Roth.
- **2022** — Created GPT-4chan and used a bot to post model-generated content on 4chan; the experiment was criticized and Hugging Face gated access to the model.
- **2022-2023** — Helped found and organize OpenAssistant with collaborators from LAION and his Discord community.
- **2023** — Co-authored the OpenAssistant Conversations paper, releasing a large volunteer-built, multilingual conversation dataset.
- **2026** — Explained DeepJudge’s integration with Claude Cowork and its use of permission-aware legal search.

## Achievements

- Co-founded DeepJudge in 2021 and leads its product and technical development as CTO.
- Earned a PhD in machine learning at ETH Zürich in 2021.
- Built a YouTube channel focused on detailed explanations of machine learning papers and research news.
- Co-authored OpenAssistant Conversations, a dataset of 161,443 messages in 35 languages built with more than 13,500 volunteers.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Discussed DeepJudge’s connection to Claude Cowork and how permission-aware search can supply legal context through MCP.
- **2025-05** — Appeared in a DeepJudge webinar on AI agents and workflows using law firms’ internal data.

## Links

- Website: https://www.ykilcher.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ykilcher/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ykilcher
- GitHub: https://github.com/YK
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@YannicKilcher

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/yannic-kilcher
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29