Lukas Biewald
{{Short description|American entrepreneur (born 1981)}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=January 2025}}{{Use American English|date=January 2025}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Lukas Biewald
| image = Lukas Biewald Poptech.jpg
| caption = Biewald speaking at PopTech 2011
| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1981}}
| birth_place = Boston, Massachusetts, United States
| education = Master of Science in Computer Science, Stanford University
| alma_mater = Stanford University
| occupation = Ceo
| website = {{URL|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,{{Cite web |title=Report: Weights & Biases Business Breakdown & Founding Story {{!}} Contrary Research |url=https://research.contrary.com/company/weights--biases |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=research.contrary.com |language=en}}{{Cite web |title=Who is the CEO of Weights & Biases? Lukas Biewald's Bio {{!}} Clay |url=https://www.clay.com/dossier/weights-biases-ceo |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=www.clay.com |language=en}}{{Cite web |date=December 23, 2024 |title=Lukas Biewald |url=https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/lukas-biewald/ |url-status=live |access-date=December 23, 2024 |website=World Economic Forum}} 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.{{Cite web |title=Lukas Biewald |url=https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fUJKrA8AAAAJ&hl=en |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=scholar.google.com}}
Early life and education
Biewald was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981.{{Cite web |last=Press |first=Cedar Street |date=April 20, 2012 |title=Mercury News Interview: Lukas Biewald, Co-founder/CEO, CrowdFlower |url=https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/04/20/mercury-news-interview-lukas-biewald-co-founderceo-crowdflower/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20241203161058/https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/04/20/mercury-news-interview-lukas-biewald-co-founderceo-crowdflower-2/ |archive-date=December 3, 2024 |access-date=December 23, 2024 |website=The Mercury News |language=en-US}} He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/cambridgerindge1999unse_0/page/16/mode/2up |title=Cambridge Rindge and Latin School yearbook |date=1999 |publisher=[Cambridge, Mass.] : Published by the Senior Class Cambridge Rindge & Latin School |others=Cambridge Public Library}} and later earned both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer science from Stanford University.{{Cite web |title=Lukas Biewald |url=https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/4839 |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=www.oreilly.com |language=en}}
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. He later joined Powerset,{{Cite web |title=Lukas Biewald |url=https://mucker.com/mentor/lukas-biewald/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=Mucker Capital |language=en-US}} a natural language search technology company, as their Senior Scientist, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for an estimated $100M.{{Cite web |last=Arrington |first=Michael |date=July 1, 2008 |title=Ok, Now It's Done. Microsoft To Acquire Powerset |url=https://techcrunch.com/2008/07/01/ok-now-its-done-microsoft-to-acquire-powerset/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=TechCrunch |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |last=Weisenthal |first=Joseph |last2=PaidContent |title=Microsoft Buys Powerset - NYTimes.com |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/paidcontent/PCORG_325065.html |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=archive.nytimes.com}}
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.{{Cite web |last=Ha |first=Anthony |date=March 10, 2019 |title=Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together |url=https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/10/appen-acquires-figure-eight/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=TechCrunch |language=en-US}}
Weights and Biases
In 2017, Biewald co-founded Weights & Biases with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis.{{Cite web |title=Weights & Biases {{!}} Company Overview & News |url=https://www.forbes.com/companies/weights-biases/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=Forbes |language=en}} 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.{{Cite web |title=Case Studies |url=https://wandb.ai/site/customers/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=Weights & Biases |language=en-US}}{{Cite web |last=Partners |first=Insight |date=September 21, 2023 |title=How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution’s must-use service |url=https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/weights-and-biases-ceo-lukas-biewald-on-building-an-ai-developer-powerhouse/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=Insight Partners |language=en-US}} Investors have valued the company at $1.25 billion.{{Cite web |date=August 9, 2023 |title=AI development tooling startup Weights & Biases reels in $50M |url=https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/09/ai-development-tooling-startup-weights-biases-reels-50m/ |access-date=2024-12-23 |website=SiliconANGLE |language=en-US}} In March of 2025 Coreweave, reached an agreement to acquire Weights and Biases, with the transaction expected to close in the first half of the year.{{Cite web |last=CoreWeave |title=CoreWeave to Acquire Weights & Biases - Industry Leading AI Developer Platform for Building and Deploying AI Applications |url=https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/coreweave-to-acquire-weights--biases---industry-leading-ai-developer-platform-for-building-and-deploying-ai-applications-302392342.html |access-date=2025-03-13 |website=www.prnewswire.com |language=en}}
Gradient Dissent
Biewald hosts the bi-weekly podcast Gradient Dissent. On the podcast, he interviews leaders in the AI space on how AI works in production. Guest have included:
- Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia{{Cite web |title=Jensen Huang — NVIDIA's CEO on the Next Generation of AI and MLOps |url=https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/jensen-huang-nvidias-ceo-on-the-next-generation-of/id1504567418?i=1000552848800 |access-date=2024-12-24 |website=Apple Podcasts |language=en-GB}}
- Jeremy Howard, Co-founder of Fast.ai{{Cite web |title=Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind Diffusion |url=https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeremy-howard-the-simple-but-profound-insight-behind/id1504567418?i=1000592708668 |access-date=2024-12-24 |website=Apple Podcasts |language=en-US}}
- Drago Anguelov, Vice-President of Research at Waymo{{Cite web |title=Drago Anguelov — Robustness, Safety, and Scalability at Waymo |url=https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/drago-anguelov-robustness-safety-and-scalability-at-waymo/id1504567418?i=1000569915184 |access-date=2024-12-24 |website=Apple Podcasts |language=en-GB}}
- Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Sumble, and Co-founder of Kaggle{{Citation |title=Anthony Goldbloom — How to Win Kaggle Competitions |date=September 9, 2020 |url=https://open.spotify.com/episode/3i1yhnvdKebieokA1Gxfa4 |access-date=2024-12-24 |language=en}}
Awards and recognition
- In 2010, Lukas Biewald won the Netexplorateur Award for creating the GiveWork iPhone app, which allows users to perform small tasks that assist refugees and people in developing countries.{{Cite web |title=Lukas Beiwald, CEO in CrowdFlower{{!}}GlobalBigDataConference |url=https://www.globalbigdataconference.com/50978/speaker-details/lukas-beiwald.html |access-date=2024-12-24 |website=www.globalbigdataconference.com}}
- In 2010, Inc Magazine included Biewald and Van Pelt on its list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30.{{Cite web |date=July 19, 2012 |title=Inc.com's 2010 30 Under 30 List: Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, Founders of Crowdflower |url=https://www.inc.com/30under30/2010/profile-lukas-biewald-chris-van-pelt-crowdflower.html |url-status=unfit |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100722172512/https://www.inc.com/30under30/2010/profile-lukas-biewald-chris-van-pelt-crowdflower.html |archive-date=July 22, 2010 |access-date=December 23, 2024 |website=Inc.}}
Publications
- Ensuring quality in crowdsourced search relevance evaluation: The effects of training question distribution by John Le, Andy Edmonds, Vaughn Hester, Lukas Biewald. SIGIR 2010 Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation, July 2010.{{Cite web |date=July 23, 2012 |title=Ensuring quality in crowdsourced search relevance evaluation: The effects of training question distribution |url=https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=fUJKrA8AAAAJ:qjMakFHDy7sC |access-date=December 23, 2024 |website=ResearchGate}}
- Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes by Lukas Biewald, Brendan O’Connor. O’Reilly July 2009{{Cite web |title=17. Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes – Beautiful Data [Book] |url=https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-data/9780596801656/ch17.html |access-date=2024-12-24 |website=www.oreilly.com |language=en}}
- Biewald has co-authored 26 AI research papers from 2004 through 2018.