Jérôme Pesenti is a French computer scientist and technology executive who has held prominent roles in artificial intelligence research and industry. He served as Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Meta (formerly Facebook) from 2018 to 2021, where he led the company's AI strategy and research efforts. Prior to that, he was the CEO of BenevolentAI, a drug discovery company using AI, and held senior positions at IBM Watson. In 2022, he founded Sizzle AI, a startup focused on developing AI-powered educational tools.
Pesenti's career spans both academic research and industrial applications of Artificial intelligence and Machine learning. He has contributed to the development of large-scale AI systems and has been a vocal advocate for responsible AI deployment. His work has influenced how AI is integrated into consumer products and enterprise solutions.
Early Career and Education
Pesenti studied computer science in France, earning a degree from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He began his career in the 1990s, working on Neural network research and natural language processing. He joined the French company Crédit Lyonnais as a data scientist, where he applied machine learning to financial modeling. In 2000, he moved to the United States to work at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, contributing to projects on question answering and cognitive computing.
At IBM, Pesenti was involved in the early development of Watson, the system that later gained fame by winning the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. He led teams working on Deep learning and Large language model technologies, helping to advance the field of Generative AI. His work at IBM also included collaborations with Nokia Bell Labs and other research institutions.
Leadership at BenevolentAI and Meta
In 2016, Pesenti became CEO of BenevolentAI, a London-based startup that used AI to accelerate drug discovery. Under his leadership, the company developed algorithms to analyze biomedical literature and identify potential treatments for diseases. He oversaw partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and helped raise significant funding for the firm.
In 2018, Pesenti joined Meta as Vice President of AI. He was responsible for overseeing the company's AI research labs, including the FAIR (Facebook AI Research) team, and for integrating AI into products like recommendation systems and content moderation. He worked with researchers such as Jakob Uszkoreit and Llion Jones on Transformer (architecture)-based models. During his tenure, Meta invested heavily in Machine learning infrastructure and published numerous papers on topics like Multi-Head Attention and Encoder-Decoder Architecture architectures.
Pesenti left Meta in 2021, reportedly due to disagreements over the company's approach to AI safety and open research. He has since been critical of the pace of AI development, calling for more rigorous evaluation of Large language model systems.
Sizzle AI and Later Ventures
In 2022, Pesenti founded Sizzle AI, a startup aimed at creating AI tutors for students. The company developed an app that uses Generative AI to help users solve math and science problems through interactive dialogue. Sizzle AI raised seed funding from investors including OpenAI co-founder Jack Clark and other tech entrepreneurs.
Sizzle AI's approach leverages Deep learning techniques to understand student queries and provide step-by-step explanations. The app initially focused on middle and high school math, but expanded to cover other subjects. Pesenti has emphasized the importance of making AI education tools accessible and affordable.
In 2024, Sizzle AI pivoted to focus on enterprise applications, offering custom AI solutions for businesses. The company has partnered with educational institutions and technology firms to deploy its models. Pesenti continues to serve as CEO, guiding the company's technical direction.
Contributions to AI Research and Policy
Throughout his career, Pesenti has published research on Neural network optimization and Learning Rate Scheduling techniques. He has been an advocate for Curriculum Learning and Data Augmentation methods to improve model performance. He has also spoken publicly about the risks of AI, including bias and misinformation, and has called for industry-wide standards.
Pesenti has served on advisory boards for several AI organizations and has been a mentor to startups in the field. He has contributed to discussions on AI regulation, testifying before government bodies about the need for transparency in AI systems. His views on Model Pruning and efficiency have influenced how companies deploy AI on resource-constrained devices.
Personal Life and Recognition
Pesenti is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been recognized as a leader in AI, receiving awards from industry groups and academic institutions. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as NeurIPS and ICML, where he has shared insights on scaling AI systems.
Despite his commercial focus, Pesenti remains engaged with academic research, collaborating with universities like MIT CSAIL and Stanford AI Lab. He has also supported efforts to make AI education more inclusive, funding scholarships for underrepresented students in computer science.
His career reflects the evolution of AI from academic curiosity to a core technology in major industries. As of 2025, Pesenti continues to lead Sizzle AI and remains an influential voice in the AI community.