Jerome PesentiFounder

United States - New York, New York

I have been involved with artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and search for the past 25 years. I most recently led the AI team at Meta -- pursuing fundamental and applied research in AI and making Meta products safer and more valuable to people through the use of AI. MetaAI's main contributions during my time there were PyTorch, AI for content moderation, very large models for ads and recommendations, and FAIR's research breakthroughs.

Previously I was co-CEO of BenevolentAI, which develops novel AI technologies that will change how drugs are discovered. Before that, I managed a global team of researchers and software engineers within IBM Watson. My team was doing research and developing state-of-the-art software in question and answering, dialog, speech, natural language processing, and automated machine translation. Our biggest research focus was on leveraging deep learning for all these tasks. We were also responsible for the Watson Developer Cloud, which exposes these technologies as easy-to-consume cloud services.

I joined IBM through its acquisition of Vivisimo, the search and text analytics company I co-founded in 2000. Vivisimo grew organically to 130 employees and had many large corporate and government customers such as P&G, Airbus, J&J, DIA, SSA, and the US Air Force. Vivisimo's technology was based on the machine learning research I conducted with my co-founders in the CS department of CMU from 1998 to 2000.

On the policy side, I served as co-chair of an independent review on the growth of AI commissioned by the UK government. This report led to a sector deal - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/artificial-intelligence-sector-deal/ai-sector-deal - and most of its recommendations have been since implemented by the UK government.