Joëlle Pineau
Chief AI Officer of Cohere
McGill professor who ran Meta’s FAIR research lab for years before becoming Cohere’s first chief AI officer in 2025 — a champion of open, reproducible science who chose enterprise AI over the AGI race.
In her words
It’s one of very few companies around the world that I think has both the ambition and the abilities to train foundation models at scale.
In a lot of cases, responsibility aspects come late in the design cycle. Here, it’s built into the research teams.
Biography
Joëlle Pineau (born 1974) is a Canadian computer scientist, a McGill University professor, and a core member of Montreal’s Mila institute, known for reinforcement learning research and for leading the machine-learning community’s push for reproducible science — including the reproducibility checklists adopted by major AI conferences. In 2017 she joined Meta to lead the Montreal arm of FAIR, the fundamental-AI research lab founded under Yann LeCun, and rose to vice president of AI research, overseeing the lab behind the open-weight Llama models.
From FAIR to Cohere
Pineau left Meta in May 2025 after roughly eight years, just before the company’s superintelligence-lab reorganization, and in August 2025 became the first chief AI officer at Cohere, the Toronto enterprise-AI company. She oversees strategy across research, product, and policy, with a focus on secure, private AI agents for business. She framed the move as a bet on pragmatism over drama, telling Fortune that many rivals are “quite singularly focused on AGI, superintelligence, and so on,” while she prefers to “fly a little bit under the radar and just get work done.”
Her stance is that of the working scientist-builder: bullish enough on foundation models to spend her career building them at industrial scale, insistent that responsibility be engineered in from the start rather than bolted on. “Given the speed at which things are moving,” she told Fortune, staying close to industry is where a researcher can have real impact.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/joelle-pineau