William Falcon is the founder and CEO of Lightning AI. Originally from Venezuela, he began his career as a Naval Officer undergoing US Navy SEAL training before studying at Columbia University. Later, while completing a Ph.D. at NYU funded by Google DeepMind and the NSF, he created PyTorch Lightning, which has become one of the most widely-used machine learning research frameworks. He also worked as a researcher at Facebook AI and at Goldman Sachs, and co-founded the now-acquired AI startup NextGenVest. His research at NYU CILVR Lab, advised by Kyunghyun Cho and Yann LeCun, is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Falcon focuses on biologically-inspired fundamental research in deep and reinforcement learning, with applications in addressing social problems, neuroscience, and natural language processing.