Connor Leahy is an AI entrepreneur and researcher with nine years of experience building and aligning large language models, currently serving as US Director at ControlAI after founding and leading Conjecture. He combines hands-on ML engineering—contributions to prominent open-source projects like EleutherAI’s GPT-Neo and a TPU-enabled GPT-2 implementation—with strategic leadership on AI safety and governance. His background includes research and engineering roles at Aleph Alpha and a Computer Science education at TUM, reflecting both applied systems work and alignment-focused research. Known in the community for bridging cutting-edge model engineering with value-aligned AI development, he also maintains an active public presence on AI policy and safety discussions.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Technical University of Munich
An implementation of training for GPT2, supports TPUs
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:32 commits, 3 PRs, 27 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Connor's commits primarily involve modifications to the `optimizers.py`, `main.py`, `predict_fns.py`, and `models/gpt2/gpt2.py` files, indicating a focus on the training and prediction aspects of a GPT2 model. They implemented custom optimizers, including AdamW and Adafactor, and integrated them with TPU support. The commits demonstrate adjustments to the model's training loop, prediction functions, and weight initialization methods, and added bfloat16 support.
An implementation of model parallel GPT-2 and GPT-3-style models using the mesh-tensorflow library.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:2 reviews, 51 commits, 3 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Connor primarily contributed to the implementation and modification of core GPT-2 related models. Their work includes exposing local attention parameters and integrating them into the model, alongside refactoring input functions to support sampling and chunking. They also made changes to support running SELU and layer-specific attention parameters.
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