Denis Yarats
Co-Founder & CTO at Perplexity
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDenis Yarats is a founder and CTO with a decade of experience building AI-native products and research-driven systems, currently leading Perplexity to redefine search with generative models. He blends deep academic grounding as a PhD student in AI at NYU with hands-on engineering leadership from roles at Facebook AI Research, Quora, and Microsoft, shipping production ML systems and research prototypes. Denis contributes to notable open-source projects—such as work on end-to-end negotiation models at Facebook Research—bringing practical improvements to training workflows and model hierarchies. As an angel investor he advises early-stage AI startups, reflecting a strong interest in translating research into product and company-building. Colocated in New York, he pairs technical depth in ML with a product-focused approach to scale intelligent systems.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Artificial Intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Artificial Intelligence at New York University
Github Skills (10)
pytorch10
machine-learning10
deep-learning10
python10
natural-language-processing9
modeling9
model-driven-development9
model-driven9
model-building9
computer-engineering8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
facebookresearch/end-to-end-negotiator
Jun 2017 - May 2020
Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:38 commits, 12 PRs, 35 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Denis primarily contributed to the core functionality of the end-to-end negotiator project. They modified the training and testing scripts by disabling GPU training by default. They added comments to the dialog model, making it more readable. The user also appears to be working on hierarchical models, adding code to the agent for handling the new model.
pytorchnlpdealend-to-enddeep-learning
denisyarats/pytorch_sac
Jan 2020 - Dec 2021
PyTorch implementation of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)
Contributions:34 commits, 2 PRs, 17 pushes in 1 year 10 months
pytorchactor-criticsoft-actor-criticsacactor
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