🌟 Welcoming a Legend: Craig Saunders joins Builder.ai as VP of AI to give Natasha wings!
Dearest Craig,
❤️ Thank you so much for choosing Builder.ai as your next home, your next family, and personally, thank you for trusting me to learn from your incredible experience.
🙉 Over the past days, I’ve thought deeply about how to introduce you, what to say, and how to give you the respect you so richly deserve given your extraordinary career and how to explain just how much we had to wait to get you to finally come from Amazon!
🏁 This has been the hardest role we have had to hire for and we have gone through many hundreds of CVs to find the right leader; who can take Natasha and Builder.ai to the next frontier.
🧠 Craig joins us from Amazon, where he spent 7 transformative years, most recently as a director in the AGI org. His journey there was nothing short of groundbreaking. Craig’s leadership was pivotal in building Knowledge Graphs for Alexa’s Q&A, pioneering the FEVER (Fact Extraction and Verification) challenges, and developing the first large seq2seq models for Alexa. He played a crucial role in federating multiple Alexa Q&A systems, ensuring seamless integration and enhanced user experiences.
💻 In 2022, Craig led the development of next-gen textual Large Language Models and significantly improved personalization for Alexa. Before his remarkable tenure at Amazon, Craig was at Xerox, delivering machine learning solutions across industries such as Customer Care, Transportation, Healthcare, and Finance. With a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of London and over 70 published papers, his contributions to the field are unparalleled.
🤗 Beyond his professional achievements, Craig’s humility and dedication to his personal passions shine through. He enjoys spending quality time with his two daughters, playing the guitar, and maintaining a marine fish tank.
😇 The fact that you decided on us so swiftly, agreeing to bring your expertise and vision, is a testament to the decisive and courageous leader we have brought into Builder.ai. Your work on foundational models, conversational assistants, and organizing world knowledge reflects the ambitious and innovative spirit we value here.
I’d probably 😀 need to write a book to reflect all your achievements, so instead, I am just ecstatic that you’re here to help me and Builder.ai deliver the digital dreams of customers across the world and of-course to give Natasha Wings!
In advance, thank you for being so patient as I make mistakes; I will make a ton, and so will Builder.ai.
Welcome to the family.
Yours truly,
CW
Ps Thank you Matt Stravitz from Riviera Partners
#WelcomeCraig #BuilderAI #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning
