Former Facebook VP champions Canadian digital sovereignty – University Affairs

Joelle Pineau is an associate professor and William Dawson scholar at McGill University’s School of Computer Science, where she co-leads the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She is also a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Until May 2025, she was vice-president of AI research at Meta (formerly Facebook), where she led the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team.  Dr. Pineau has worked in AI for more than 25 years. After beginning her career in voice recognition in the 1990s, she specialized in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and machine learning at McGill. She co-founded the Reasoning and Learning Lab and helped make Montreal a global centre for AI.  In April 2025, she announced she would be leaving Meta and taking time to consider her next professional steps.  Photo by Selena Phillips-Boyle Q. Tell us about your experience at Meta.  A. I worked for Facebook (Meta) for all those years because it was, at the time, the only company capable of conducting cutting-edge AI research with large-scale models while embracing an open-science approach. That meant we could publish our results, make code accessible, and freely share our models.  I’m tremendously
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