Matt Bamberger

Founder, Intelligent Artifice

Matt Bamberger is the founder of Intelligent Artifice, a new AI research company working toward developing human-equivalent artificial intelligence. He studied physics at the University of Chicago from 1984 to 1988, also writing software for the astronomy department's Local InterStellar Medium project, as well as engaging in personal research on 21 cm hydrogen emissions. He left to pursue a career at Microsoft, where he served as a software design engineer from 1988 to 2000.

While at Microsoft Matt Bamberger worked as a developer on the Help team. He wrote the text engine for the Excel 2.2 Help system and for the Windows 3.0 Help system. In addition to shipping with several versions of Windows, the Windows 3 Help system was the foundation for many of Microsoft's early multimedia products. He later worked as a developer on the Excel charting team, shipping 3.0 and 4.0, and was the dev lead for the charting team on Excel for the Excel 5.0 release. When the Charting team split off from the core Excel development team, he became the development manager for the Charting Product Unit. His team produced a charting engine that shipped both as a core part of Excel and as an embeddable component with Word and Powerpoint. During his tenure Charting grew to about ten developers and shipping with Excel 95 and 97. He was the development manager for the Simulation Games group at Microsoft, shipping Flight Simulator 2000 and Combat Flight Simulator 1 as well as a number of smaller titles. The Sims development team consisted of four separate product teams with a total of about 35 developers. Before leaving Microsoft, he spent a few months working on the XBox game console before it was officially called XBox.

After leaving Microsoft, he briefly experimented with being retired and found he wasn't very good at it. So from 2001 to 2006 he served as the development manager for Steam, a massive online gaming service (1 million peak simultaneous users, 2.5 million unique users per month) that allows users to buy and update games, as well as providing a host of other services such as in-game instant messaging and cheat prevention. In addition to presenting some very interesting technical challenges, Steam was a market leader in an emerging market, and his job involved solving a lot of fundamental business and product design problems. He also created the original Valve Anti-Cheat System (VAC).

An advisory board member for the Lifeboat Foundation, he currently writes on such topics as AI, life extension, and the Singularity at mattbamberger.com.