TIME100 AI 2026 · Leaders
Joëlle Pineau
Chief AI Officer, Cohere
Before leading Meta's AI research lab, she sat in a helicopter cockpit recording her own voice to train a speech system, because no female pilots were available.
- Born
- 1974, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Now
- Chief AI Officer, Cohere
- Studied
- Carnegie Mellon University, University of Waterloo
Interesting facts
- Side project
Played viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra.
en.wikipedia.org - Detour
Her first job was at Canada's natural resources ministry, building models for solar energy use in fish farming.
en.wikipedia.org - Connection
Her Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD was supervised by Sebastian Thrun, who later led Google's self-driving car project.
en.wikipedia.org - First
As reproducibility chair of NeurIPS 2019 she introduced the reproducibility checklist that paper authors now fill in.
en.wikipedia.org - In their words
Warns that relying on another country's AI models means a critical part of your infrastructure could be "shut off without you having any control."
time.com
Career
- CohereChief AI Officer2025 to now
- MetaVP AI Research, global lead of FAIR, FAIR2017–2025
- McGill UniversityProfessor, School of Computer Sciencefrom 2004
- Natural Resources Canada
Education
- PhD, Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, 2004
- MSc, Carnegie Mellon University
- BASc, Engineering, University of Waterloo
Sources1en.wikipedia.org
