Lukas Biewald

Last updated

Lukas Biewald
Lukas Biewald Poptech.jpg
Biewald speaking at PopTech 2011
Born1981 (age 4344)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
EducationMaster of Science in Computer Science, Stanford University
Alma materStanford University
OccupationCeo
Website lukasbiewald.com

Lukas Biewald (born 1981) is an American entrepreneur and a prominent figure in artificial intelligence. He is recognized for his contributions to machine learning and as the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases, [1] [2] [3] a company that builds developer tools for AI. He previously founded and was CEO of Figure Eight, a human-in-the-loop machine learning platform. He has co-authored 26 AI research papers from 2004 through 2018, including Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival. [4]

Contents

Early life and education

Biewald was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981. [5] He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School [6] and later earned both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer science from Stanford University. [2] [7]

Early Career and Founding Figure Eight

After graduation, Biewald joined Yahoo! as an engineer, working on machine translations to improve search results, and eventually led the Search Relevance Team for Yahoo! Japan. [2] He later joined Powerset, [8] a natural language search technology company, as their Senior Scientist, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for an estimated $100M. [9] [10]

In 2007, Biewald co-founded Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), a data labeling and crowdsourcing company that created datasets for training machine learning models. Figure Eight was acquired by Appen in 2019 for $300 million. [11]

Weights and Biases

In 2017, Biewald co-founded Weights & Biases with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis. [12] The company provides tools for tracking machine learning experiments, model management, and collaborative AI and LLM app development. The platform has been adopted by organizations such as OpenAI, Salesforce, and Microsoft. [13] [14] In March of 2025 Coreweave acquired Weights and Biases at $1.7 billion, with the transaction closing on May 5, 2025. [15] [16]

Gradient Dissent

Biewald hosts the bi-weekly podcast Gradient Dissent. Guest have included:

Awards and recognition

Publications

References

  1. "Report: Weights & Biases Business Breakdown & Founding Story | Contrary Research". research.contrary.com. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 "Who is the CEO of Weights & Biases? Lukas Biewald's Bio | Clay". www.clay.com. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  3. "Lukas Biewald". World Economic Forum. December 23, 2024. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  4. 1 2 "Lukas Biewald". scholar.google.com. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  5. Press, Cedar Street (April 20, 2012). "Mercury News Interview: Lukas Biewald, Co-founder/CEO, CrowdFlower". The Mercury News. Archived from the original on December 3, 2024. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  6. Cambridge Rindge and Latin School yearbook. Cambridge Public Library. [Cambridge, Mass.] : Published by the Senior Class Cambridge Rindge & Latin School. 1999.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  7. "Lukas Biewald". www.oreilly.com. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  8. "Lukas Biewald". Mucker Capital. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  9. Arrington, Michael (July 1, 2008). "Ok, Now It's Done. Microsoft To Acquire Powerset". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  10. Weisenthal, Joseph; PaidContent. "Microsoft Buys Powerset - NYTimes.com". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  11. Ha, Anthony (March 10, 2019). "Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  12. "Weights & Biases | Company Overview & News". Forbes. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  13. "Case Studies". Weights & Biases. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  14. Partners, Insight (September 21, 2023). "How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution's must-use service". Insight Partners. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  15. "CoreWeave to buy Weights & Biases for $1.7B". The Information. April 28, 2025. Retrieved August 7, 2025.
  16. "CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases | CoreWeave". www.coreweave.com. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  17. "Anthony Goldbloom — How to Win Kaggle Competitions". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  18. "Richard Socher — The Challenges of Making ML Work in the Real World". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  19. "Jensen Huang — NVIDIA's CEO on the Next Generation of AI and MLOps". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  20. "Emad Mostaque — Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and What's Next". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  21. "Drago Anguelov — Robustness, Safety, and Scalability at Waymo". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  22. "Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind Diffusion". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  23. "Scaling LLMs and Accelerating Adoption with Aidan Gomez at Cohere". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  24. "Shaping the World of Robotics with Chelsea Finn". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  25. "Launching the Fastest AI Inference Solution with Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  26. "GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on Copilot and the Future of Software Development". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  27. "From Pharma to AGI Hype, and Developing AI in Finance: Martin Shkreli's Journey". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  28. "How DeepL Built a Translation Powerhouse with AI with CEO Jarek Kutylowski". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved August 8, 2025.
  29. "Lukas Beiwald, CEO in CrowdFlower|GlobalBigDataConference". www.globalbigdataconference.com. Retrieved December 24, 2024.
  30. "Inc.com's 2010 30 Under 30 List: Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, Founders of Crowdflower". Inc. July 19, 2012. Archived from the original on July 22, 2010. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  31. "Ensuring quality in crowdsourced search relevance evaluation: The effects of training question distribution". ResearchGate. July 23, 2012. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
  32. "17. Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes – Beautiful Data [Book]". www.oreilly.com. Retrieved December 24, 2024.