Douwe Kiela
Douwe Kiela is a Dutch-American research scientist and entrepreneur working in the field of artificial intelligence with a focus on machine learning and natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI, an enterprise software company that provides a platform for building grounded AI agents for enterprise knowledge bases.
He previously led the research team at Meta AI that introduced the RAG approach in 2020, co-authoring the foundational paper "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks." Kiela also served as Head of Research at Hugging Face and is an adjunct professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.
Early life and education
Douwe Kiela was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1986.He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Utrecht University, with a double major in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy. He then obtained an MSc in logic from the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Kiela received an MPhil and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, specializing in natural language processing and machine learning.
Career
Facebook AI Research (Meta)
In 2016, Kiela joined Facebook AI Research (FAIR) as a postdoctoral researcher, later becoming a research scientist in New York. While at Meta, he co-authored papers in natural language processing, with a focus on multimodal and grounded language learning. His projects included creating a virtual assistant bot that could navigate tourists around a city and leading the development of Dynabench, an interactive benchmarking platform released in 2020 that used human feedback to test and improve language models.In 2020, Kiela led the Meta AI research team that introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), co-authoring the influential paper "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks," alongside Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, and other researchers. The RAG framework transformed how large language models access and incorporate external information by allowing them to retrieve relevant context from external knowledge bases at query time, rather than relying solely on pre-trained data. This approach addressed key limitations such as hallucination, outdated information, and lack of source attribution. The RAG technique has since become widely adopted in enterprise AI applications and knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks.
Hugging Face
After leaving Meta, Kiela served as Head of Research at Hugging Face.Contextual AI
In 2023, Kiela co-founded Contextual AI with Amanpreet Singh, another former researcher at Facebook AI Research and Hugging Face. The Mountain View-based company develops a platform for building grounded AI agents for enterprises, focusing on applications in technology, semiconductor, logistics, finance, and media sectors.Contextual AI raised $20 million in seed funding in June 2023, led by Bain Capital Ventures. In August 2024, the company completed an $80 million Series A funding round led by Greycroft, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, NVentures, HSBC Ventures, and Snowflake Ventures, among others.