Joëlle Pineau

Joëlle Pineau trained as an engineer at the University of Waterloo and earned an MSc and PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, then built a research group at McGill University on planning and learning under uncertainty, with applications in robotics and health care. She became known across the field for a procedural reform: as the first reproducibility chair of NeurIPS in 2019 she introduced a checklist that asks authors to supply code, data and experimental details with their submissions, and she started the ML Reproducibility Challenge.

Facebook hired her in 2017 to open its AI research lab in Montreal. She rose to managing director of Meta AI and argued inside the company for releasing work openly. When Meta released OPT-175B in May 2022, a GPT-3-sized model given to researchers with its code and a logbook of every crash in training, she told MIT Technology Review, "That commitment to open science is why I'm here. I wouldn't be here on any other terms." From early 2023 she led all of FAIR, the group that produced the first LLaMA models, reporting to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

On 1 April 2025, days before Llama 4's troubled launch, she announced she would leave on 30 May, writing that "it is time to create space for others to pursue the work." A Meta spokesperson called her "an important voice for Open Source," and in May the company named Rob Fergus, a FAIR co-founder, to succeed her. In August 2025 Cohere made her its first chief AI officer, in charge of research, product and policy, as it raised 500 million dollars at a 6.8 billion dollar valuation; she remains a McGill professor, on part-time leave. At Cohere she has pitched open models and customer-controlled deployments to businesses and governments, and TIME named her to its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.