Leon Song

About Leon Song

I am the VP and head of research at Together.ai, a unicorn AI startup company at San Francisco. I lead the R&D team consisting of teams working on various fronts of GenAI: modeling and data products, pretraining and finetuning, and our core inference stack. I lead the research org that owns the core IPs and technologies of Together.ai. I work closely with our engineering org, product and sales to enable the most cutting-edge GenAI products on Together AI cloud. Prior to this role, I was a senior principal research manager at Microsoft, conducting pathfinding projects for Microsoft GenAI roadmap, and the chief scientist for DeepSpeed4Science Initiative. At Microsoft, I was also managing the Brainwave team in Bing and its future expansion. Before Microsoft, I was a tenured CS professor. Large-scale production system R&D for LLMs, LLM+X and other related GenAI technologies and market adaptation. Tech executive and leadership in creating market ready Gen-AI R&D products, with an emphasis of large-scale system design and AI cloud.

Experience

1. VP of Research

   Together AI

   Mar 2024 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   I am the VP and head of research at Together.ai, a unicorn AI startup company at San Francisco. I lead the R&D team consisting of teams working on various fronts of GenAI: modeling and data products, pretraining and finetuning, and our core inference stack. I lead the research org that owns the core IPs and technolgoies of Together.ai. I work closely with our engineering org, product and sales to enable cutting-edge GenAI products on Together AI cloud.

Education

• Virginia Tech

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science

  2009 — 2013

• Virginia Tech

  Master's degree, Computer Science

  2007 — 2009