Full Name

William Falcon

Job Title

Founder and CEO

Company

Lightning AI

Speaker Bio

William Falcon is the founder and CEO of Lightning AI. Originally from Venezuela, he began his career as a Naval Officer undergoing US Navy SEAL training before studying at Columbia University. Later, while completing a Ph.D. at NYU funded by Google DeepMind and the NSF, he created PyTorch Lightning, which has become one of the most widely-used machine learning research frameworks. He also worked as a researcher at Facebook AI and at Goldman Sachs, and co-founded the now-acquired AI startup NextGenVest. His research at NYU CILVR Lab, advised by Kyunghyun Cho and Yann LeCun, is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Falcon focuses on biologically-inspired fundamental research in deep and reinforcement learning, with applications in addressing social problems, neuroscience, and natural language processing.