Jason Weston

Jason Weston is a Senior Director and Research Scientist at Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and a Visiting Research Professor at NYU. Prior to this, he held Research Scientist positions at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (2002-2003), NEC Labs (2003-2009) and Google (2009-2014), after receiving his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2000.

Dr. Weston's research includes best paper awards at ICML'06 and ECML'10, a test of time award at ICML'18 and an outstanding paper award at ACL'25. He was part of the YouTube team that won a National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering for Personalized Recommendation for Video Discovery.

Some of his notable work influencing the field includes the "NLP from scratch" work starting in 2008 which introduced pretraining and fine-tuning of language models, Memory Networks in 2014-2015 which introduced multi-layer attention pre-Transformers, DrQA in 2017 which introduced RAG-like methods, BlenderBot 1-3 and other LLM dialogue research pre-ChatGPT in 2018-2022, and more recently work like Self-Rewarding LLMs for self-improvement.