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 OpenAI's GPT-Neo 2.7B model 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 is quite unremarkable (by today's standards), I was immediately 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 Department 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 (a philosopher who began writing about the philosophy of information and computing in the 1990s). This prototype led to the creation of the Luciano Floridi Bot (launched through Yale News in March 2024). This tool uses retrieval-augmented generation to search and synthesize three decades of Luciano’s books; it has now reached people 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. Our organization's public statement has aged well: it warned that unregulated access to frontier models could allow adversaries to build and deploy hazardous AI systems.
In November 2024, through Encode, I worked with Dorota and Francesca Mani to organize a summit on Capitol Hill that brought together Senators Cruz, Klobuchar, and Durbin to combat AI-generated nonconsensual imagery in schools. This advocacy played a small role in building bipartisan support for the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into federal law on May 19, 2025.
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.