Lukas Biewald

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, 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, including ''Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival''.

Early life and education

Biewald was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981. He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and later earned both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer science from Stanford University.

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, a natural language search technology company, as their Senior Scientist, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for an estimated $100M.

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.

Media Appearances

A high-profile, investigative 2019 documentary titled ''Ghost Workers'' was about the labor practices and workers of Biewald's company Figure Eight Inc., with Biewald as a central character. The creators focused on a clip of the company's founder, Lukas Biewald, speaking during an in person technology panel, describing his attitude toward online, remote contract workers, emphasizing the ability of the internet to facilitate worker disposability and the ability to pay workers small amounts of money.

Biewald's attitudes toward worker pay had raised eyebrows before, with ''The Nation'' also quoting Biewald saying, "Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore." When questioned by The Nation, Biewald framed his approach a bit differently stating online "crowdwork"-dependent businesses of his type were, "bringing opportunities to people who never would have had them before, and we operate in a truly egalitarian fashion".

The documentarians in ''Ghost Workers'' interviewed and followed the lives of two contract workers for Figure Eight, including a top ranked Figure Eight contract worker in Maine who used Figure Eight as a primary income source. This top ranked worker was living in public housing, spent entire days on the platform to increase her rank on the site, and described the pay as unfair. She described on a "good day" she made about $5/hour and on a "bad day", around 10 cents an hour working for Figure Eight Inc. The documentarians also timed another worker while working on the platform, confirming he was making pennies on the dollar per hour working continuously categorizing consumer products. The documentarians then confronted Biewald and his PR representative in person about labor practices after having interviewed him about other topics. Lukas claimed to have little to no knowledge about average worker pay on his own platform, concluding by claiming, "I don't really know how much people really make". He also physically walked out of the interview after being asked about the legality of paying under minimum wage, while the PR representative tried to replace his absence during the interview. As the PR representative was confronted with worker accounts they discovered, the PR rep announced he too was leaving. Shortly after this interview, Biewald sold the company.

Weights and Biases

In 2017, Biewald co-founded Weights & Biases with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis. 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. Investors have valued the company at $1.25 billion. 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.

Gradient Dissent

Biewald hosts the bi-weekly podcast Gradient Dissent. Guest have included:
* Martin Shkreli, convicted felon and ex-pharmacy profiteer
* Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia
* Jeremy Howard, Co-founder of Fast.ai
* Drago Anguelov, Vice-President of Research at Waymo
* Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Sumble, and Co-founder of Kaggle

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.
* In 2010, ''Inc Magazine'' included Biewald and Van Pelt on its list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30.

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.
* ''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 ook, 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.

References

1981 births
Living people
American technology company founders
Artificial intelligence people
Businesspeople from Boston