Nicolas Gertler
About
Hi, I’m Nicolas. I grew up in Los Angeles and am a senior at Yale studying cognitive science. I’m obsessed with product design and enjoy learning about transactional law and environmental policy. Day to day, I’m usually reading some new AI paper, on the bike, or searching for the best espresso anywhere between New Haven & SF.
In August 2021, I ran GPT-Neo 2.7B on my Mac. I downloaded nearly ten GB of model weights, and typed “What is the meaning of life?” into a .ipynb notebook. While the model's response was circular and quite unimpressive (by today's standards), I was instantly intrigued...and slowly became hooked.
In high school, experimenting with early generative AI models (pre ChatGPT) convinced me that AI would rewire education. I decided to shoot my shot and cold email the Office of Educational Technology. Surprisingly, they responded; and on my first day of classes at Yale in August 2023, I found myself meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Education discussing the future of AI in classrooms.
That fall, I shared a prototype of an LLM that I built for my cognitive science course with Luciano Floridi, the founding director of the Yale Digital Ethics Center. The prototype led to the creation of the Luciano Floridi Bot (launched via Yale News in April 2024). This bot uses retrieval-augmented generation to search and synthesize three decades of Luciano’s papers and books and has now reached users across 107 countries.
Around that time, Fidutam, a public benefit corporation I helped lead, started writing and sending policy memos to congressional offices about frontier AI risks. That led to advising the U.S. Senate through the AI Insight Forum's 8th session on AI safety and alignment, organized by Senators Schumer, Rounds, Heinrich, and Young.
In July 2025, I partnered with The Reckoning Project, an NGO led by Yale Jackson Senior Fellow Janine di Giovanni, to build MANTRA — an AI platform that helps prosecutors in Ukraine structure witness testimony and build admissible legal cases. Supported by the U.S. Department of State, MANTRA exists to hold perpetrators of Russian war crimes accountable.
This summer, I co-founded the Yale Hacker House, a ten-week residency in San Francisco backed by Caffeinated Capital and Ashurst Perkins Coie. Our founders have raised over $17 million across aerospace, robotics, and other critical industries. We were fortunate to be featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Gazetteer SF.
I am now building Density Partners, an AI legal services startup.