creators

Douwe Kiela - Google DeepMind researcher, RAG co-author

Douwe Kiela is a researcher at Google DeepMind, senior author of the 2020 RAG paper, former CEO of Contextual AI and adjunct professor at Stanford.

Douwe Kiela is a Dutch-American research scientist and entrepreneur working in natural language processing and machine learning. He was born in Amsterdam in 1986 and holds a BSc in liberal arts and sciences from Utrecht University (a double major in cognitive artificial intelligence and philosophy), an MSc in logic from the University of Amsterdam's ILLC, and an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Kiela joined Facebook AI Research in 2016 and led the Meta AI team that introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation in 2020; he is the senior author of "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks", the paper that made retrieval at inference time a standard part of how language models are grounded. He was then Head of Research at Hugging Face. In 2023 he co-founded Contextual AI with Amanpreet Singh to build enterprise RAG systems, and was its CEO through a $20 million seed round and an $80 million Series A. In May 2026, under a licensing agreement between Google and Contextual AI, Kiela and more than twenty Contextual AI researchers moved to Google DeepMind; Jay Chen took over as interim CEO of the startup. His own site now describes him as a researcher at Google DeepMind and former CEO of Contextual AI. He remains an adjunct professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.

Specialization

retrieval-augmented generation, natural language processing, multimodal learning, model evaluation and benchmarking

Country

United States