Lukas Biewald

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Lukas Biewald
Lukas Biewald Poptech.jpg
Biewald speaking at PopTech 2011
Born1981 (age 42–43)
Alma mater Stanford University

Lukas Biewald (born 1981 in Massachusetts) is the CEO & co-founder of Weights & Biases, the AI developer platform with tools for training models, fine-tuning models, and leveraging foundation models. Weights & Biases is used by machine learning teams in organizations such as OpenAI, Meta, Cohere, and NVIDIA. In 2023, Weights & Biases was on the Forbes AI 50 list [1] and the winner of the Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning [2].

Contents

Before Weights & Biases, Lukas was the co-founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt. [1] In 2019, Biewald sold Figure Eight to Appen for 300 million dollars. [2]

Biewald is also the host of Gradient Dissent, a machine learning podcast that takes you behind-the-scenes to learn how industry leaders are putting deep learning models in production.

Early life

As a child, Biewald was a fan of watching PBS science documentaries. He was drawn in and fascinated by the potential of AI and its ability to create and replicate human behavior with technology. In an interview, he noted: "The idea that computers could learn to do things on their own just seemed amazing to me. It always kind of felt like humanity’s last project." [3]

Education

Biewald holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. [4] He was also a research assistant in Daphne Koller's group in the Stanford AI Lab.

Career

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, where he focused on using statistical machine learning approaches to improve the web search ranking function for international markets. He later joined Powerset, a natural language search technology company, as their Senior Scientist.

In 2007, Biewald co-founded Figure Eight with Chris Van Pelt. The company was later acquired by Appen in March 2019 for 300 million dollars.

In 2018, Biewald partnered with Chris Van Pelt again and pulled in Shawn Lewis, a long-time friend with the founder's experience to co-found Weights & Biases. Together, they used their combined knowledge, skills, and experiences to create tools that could support machine learning practitioners and move forward the state-of-the-art of machine learning. The goal, he said was to "build a company that would help behind the scenes in making stuff reliable”. [4]

Awards and honors

Academic life

Biewald holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.

While pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Stanford University, Biewald won the California Institute of Technology Turing Tournament. [9]

He is the author of several academic papers [10] [11] [12] on applications of crowdsourcing, as well as a chapter on crowdsourcing gender and age stereotypes [13] in O'Reilly Media's Beautiful Data that he co-authored with Brendan O'Connor.

Publications

Media appearances

Biewald appeared in an episode of Hidden in Plain Sight entitled "Deep Learning is Eating the World", [14] where he discussed software evolution and the effect of machine learning on humanity.

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References

  1. ↑ Barret, Victoria (11 March 2009). "Dolores Labs Vets Web Sites On The Cheap". Forbes. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  2. ↑ Ha, Anthony. "Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together".
  3. ↑ D'Onfro, Jillian (2023-09-21). "How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution's must-use service". Insight Partners. Retrieved 2023-10-27.
  4. ↑ Biewald, Lukas (October 27, 2023). "Lukas Biewald". LinkedIn. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  5. ↑ "The TechCrunch50 Finalists 2009". TechCrunch. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  6. ↑ "Lukas BIEWALD / Add value to the world". Netexplorateur. 4 May 2010. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  7. ↑ "GiveWork - Dolores Labs - platform iOS 3.0 - version 1.1". iTunes . 3 February 2010.
  8. ↑ Lagorio, Christine (19 July 2010). "Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, Founders of Crowdflower". Inc. Magazine. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  9. ↑ Archived November 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ Biewald, Lukas (2010). "Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival". XRDS: Crossroads, the ACM Magazine for Students. 17 (2): 10–15. doi:10.1145/1869086.1869093. S2CID   11144147 . Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  11. ↑ "Scalable crisis relief: Crowdsourced SMS translation and categorization with Mission 4636" (PDF). ACM DEV ’10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 February 2011. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  12. ↑ "Ensuring quality in crowdsourced search relevance evaluation: The effects of training question distribution" (PDF). SIGIR ’10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2010. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  13. ↑ Beautiful Data. O'Reilly Media. 2009. p. 384. ISBN   978-0-596-15711-1.
  14. ↑ "Deep Learning is Eating the World"
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