Facebook Hires The Scientist Who Helped Build IBM Watson to Lead A.I. expansion

Facebook hires the scientist who helped build IBM Watson to lead his A.I. Expansión Facebook hires the scientist who helped build IBM Watson to lead his A.I. expansion

Facebook has hired a former IBM executive to be its head of artificial intelligence, as it seeks to expand its efforts in that area.

Personnel changes occur when Amazon, Google and Microsoft also work in AI.

Jérôme Pesenti, who led the development of the Watson platform at IBM after IBM acquired a company he co-founded, Vivismimo, will assume the new role of vice president of AI, a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday. More recently, Pesenti was in the European company BenevolentAI. Quartz originally reported the news.

Meanwhile, Yann LeCun, an AI member from New York University who joined Facebook in 2013 to be the director of Facebook's then-new Artificial Intelligence Research unit, is leaving that publication and is becoming Facebook's main AI scientist, said the spokesman.

Several leaders of the FAIR group, along with the head of the Applied Automatic Apprenticeship Group of Facebook, will report to Pesenti, who will in turn report to Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer, the spokesperson said.

Facebook will accelerate its growth in AI under Pesenti, the spokesperson said. The FAIR group has more than 130 people around the world. In addition to better accommodating growth, the changes should also help the transfer of technology from the FAIR group to the AML group, the spokesperson said.

In September, Facebook announced the opening of an IA laboratory in Montreal, and this week the company said it would double the size of its AI laboratory in Paris.

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