Houda Nait El Barj leads Experience Research at OpenAI, where she works on human flourishing: the question of whether AI is actually making people's lives better, not just whether they're clicking. She holds a PhD in Economics and Computer Science from Stanford, did stints at CERN and NASA before turning twenty-two, and grew up in a village in rural Morocco.

Houda Nait El Barj leads Experience Research at OpenAI, where she works on human flourishing: the question of whether AI is actually making people's lives better, not just whether they're clicking. She holds a PhD in Economics and Computer Science from Stanford, did stints at CERN and NASA before turning twenty-two, and grew up in a village in rural Morocco. She writes weekly on Substack and on X about what AI is actually doing to people's lives, from the farm worker in her hometown using ChatGPT to negotiate a fair wage to the engineer in San Francisco using Codex to build entire products overnight. She is equally inspired by Galileo, Heidegger, and her Uber driver. Her central question reframes the entire field: not did someone click, but did their life get better?