He is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, now the leading college text in the field. He previously was head of the Computational Sciences Division (now the Intelligent Systems Division) at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis, neuroengineering, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison shopping services; Chief designer at Harlequin Inc.; and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial intelligence, Natural language processing and Software Engineering including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.

Norvig is also known for his "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", a satire about bad presentation practices using Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address.

Norvig is one of the creators of JScheme.

In 2006 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Norvig is listed under "Academic Faculty & Advisors" for the Singularity University.