March 12, 2025
The Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, hosted invited speakers Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis, CEO of Oumi & Matthew Persons, Co-founder, Engineering of Oumi delivered a talk titled The Imperative for Open Source Frontier AI – Oumi’s Platform & Strategy on Wednesday 19 March, at 17:00 (Athens time). The talk was held online via zoom.
The presentation of the talk is available here, and you can watch the video of the talk below.
About the talk: Open source is the best path to developing the most advanced, trusted, and versatile AI; the AI that would unlock industry applications and truly empower the sciences. Unfortunately though, frontier AI has become over the last 2+ years increasingly closed giving rise to significant concerns and risks. We will discuss the efforts that Oumi, alongside 20+ academics, recently started to put us on a better path by betting on and fostering open source frontier AI. Lastly, We will make a call to action. To succeed, broad collaboration is needed across academia, the industry, and across the world.
Short bios:
Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis
Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis is the CEO of Oumi PBC focusing on democratizing foundation model research and development. He had previously led the science and engineering for Google Cloud’s Natural Language Services while also bootstrapping and leading the Google Cloud GenAI (PaLM/Gemini) efforts across a 300+ v-team covering model quality, Responsible AI, and all related infrastructure from inception all the way to General Availability. He has been working on GenAI systems since 2016 at Microsoft and then Meta. He holds a PhD from Princeton University where he set the early foundations for edge AI and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens. His research career includes positions at MIT, Microsoft Research, SMART (Singapore) and CERN. His research has been featured in top-tier conferences, journals and news articles receiving a Best Paper Award and other distinctions with over 5,000 citations.
Matthew Persons
Matthew Persons is a cofounder and engineer at Oumi PBC, focused on democratizing foundation model research and development. Previously he was the engineering lead for the Natural Language team in Google Cloud, where he led 50+ engineers across 10+ teams to bootstrap Google Cloud’s first Generative AI offerings (PaLM / Gemini) from inception to General Availability. He also spearheaded Google Cloud’s Natural Language API offerings with $10M+ ARR. Prior to Google he worked at Microsoft (circa 2016). Matthew holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer science with a focus in Artificial Intelligence from Cornell University. He excels at building and deploying enterprise-grade AI systems and pipelines at scale.
