Google Duplex · Speculative Decoding · Selective Attention · GameNGen · The Art of Transformer Programming

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
- Richard Feynman

Google Research

2022 - Present

I am a Distinguished Engineer at Google where I lead an AI-research lab, focusing on foundation research. I am spending a lot of my time researching new model architectures for LLMs, as well as new training procedures and data sources. My work made most of Google's important LLMs substantially faster and cheaper. I also do fun research in fields such as image, video, and game generation.

With my team and collaborators, I invented Speculative Decoding (2022) and Selective Attention (2024), ran DOOM on a neural model in real-time with GameNGen (2024), developed techniques for neural image and video editing with UniTune (2022), Dreamix (2023), and Face0 (2023), and wrote The Art of Transformer Programming (2022) book.

Google Duplex

2016 - 2022

I founded and was the Engineering Director for Google Duplex, an AI system that can speak naturally over the phone. Duplex is calling businesses at high scale (for many years!), and is a major contributor to Google’s updated business data, like opening hours. In fact, business data from Duplex’s phone calls was shown to users over 1 trillion times.

Google Search

2010 - 2018

I started and led the team that built the AI system that reads and understands the open web and automatically populates Google's Knowledge Graph. Thanks to this system, Google Search shows answers, cards, and lists on a large fraction of user queries like [homer simpson], [world war 2], and [nba teams]. I also led the team that built the backend of Google Trends.

Previously

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

I have been doing AI research for a long while. In 1998, as a high school student, I joined a startup building video understanding software where I programmed some neural networks (in plain C!). I've also founded and was the CEO of a company called Tailor where we built a system that automatically modifies websites based on users' usage patterns. A couple of decades ago I've spent several intensive years working on cryptography and cybersecurity. I've met some of the smartest people that I know back then, many of whom are still amongst my best friends. I've also spent a few years working on gaming and computer graphics, which remain among my favorite fields to this day. I studied pure math (for the soul) in Tel-Aviv University. Oh, and I have a blog which features my collection of math and hacking puzzles, as well as write-ups of some of my favorite weekend projects. Try a fun puzzle like Rabbit Season, Really Equal? Naturally!, Expanding Map, or (×2, +1) Equivalence.