Percy Liang is an American computer scientist, researcher, and professor at Stanford University. He is the Director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) and a co-founder of the decentralized AI startup Together AI.
Academic and Semantic Parsing Research
Liang earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2011. His research at Stanford focused on natural language processing, semantic parsing, and machine learning robustness. He pioneered models that translate natural language queries into logical databases, forming the basis of modern conversational database interfaces.
Foundation Models and Together AI
In 2021, Liang founded the Center for Research on Foundation Models at Stanford to study the social, economic, and technical impact of massive pre-trained models. He led the creation of **HELM (Holistic Evaluation of Language Models)**, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates LLMs on safety, accuracy, and bias. In 2022, he co-founded Together AI to democratize AI compute and model hosting.
