Sara Hooker

Sara Hooker is a leading artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur focused on building more efficient, adaptive AI systems. She is currently working on Adaption Labs, where she is developing AI that continually learns and evolves rather than relying on ever-larger amounts of computing power.

Previously, Hooker was Vice President of Research at Cohere, where she led Cohere Labs, a frontier AI research lab tackling complex machine-learning problems. Before that, she was a research scientist at Google DeepMind. Her work spans machine learning, AI efficiency, and the intersection of hardware, software, and algorithms, and has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Atlantic, Axios, and TechCrunch.

Hooker earned her PhD in Computer Science from Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, under the supervision of Hugo Larochelle and Aaron Courville. She serves on Kaggle’s Machine Learning Advisory Research Board and the World Economic Forum’s council on the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Data. She was also named one of TIME magazine’s most influential people in AI.

Hooker is particularly interested in making machine learning more reliable, accessible, and useful in the real world—and in rethinking how AI research and breakthroughs happen.