Jon Saad-Falcon

jonsaadfalcon@stanford.edu jonsaadfalcon.com Google Scholar

Scaling Intelligence Lab and Hazy Research, Stanford University


Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, Stanford University (2023 – present) Advisors: Christopher Re and Azalia Mirhoseini

M.B.A., Stanford Graduate School of Business (2023 – present)

B.S. – M.S., Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology (2018 – 2022) Advisor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau Minors: Mathematics and Linguistics


Research Experience

2023 – present | PhD Researcher, Stanford University, Computer Science Areas: language models, ML systems, intelligence efficiency, inference-time techniques.

2026 – present Google Student Researcher, Google – TPU and Gemini teams

2023 | Research Intern, Databricks, Office of the CTO (San Francisco, CA) Research internship with Prof. Matei Zaharia. Built automated evaluation system for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

2022 – 2023 | Fulbright Scholar, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin (Germany) Research collaboration with Prof. Ulf Leser. Developed AI-powered techniques for patient treatment design using EHRs.

2021 – 2022 | Predoctoral Young Investigator, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) – Semantic Scholar Mentors: Doug Downey and Daniel Weld. Designed efficiency techniques for caching and reusing sequence representations in language models.

2021 | Research Intern, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) Research internship with Prof. Christopher Potts and Prof. Matei Zaharia. NSF-funded REU; built the LoTTE benchmark and contributed to ColBERTv2.

2019 – 2022 | Undergraduate Research Assistant, Georgia Institute of Technology Advisors: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau and Diyi Yang. Projects in NLP, data visualization, and computational social science.


Awards & Honors

2025 JP Morgan AI/ML Fellowship
2023 Stanford Graduate Fellowship
2023 Stanford EDGE Fellowship
2023 GEM PhD Fellowship, National GEM Consortium
2023 Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, Finalist, Stanford University
2023 Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
2023 College of Engineering Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley
2022 Fulbright Scholarship, Research Award, U.S. State Department and German Federal Foreign Office
2022 Summer Venture in Management Program (SVMP), Harvard Business School
2021 Donald V. Jackson Fellowship, Georgia Tech
2021 Computer Science Research Mentorship Program, Google
2021 U.N. Millennium Fellowship, United Nations
2020 D.E. Shaw Nexus Fellowship
2020 President’s Undergraduate Research Award, Georgia Tech
2018 Stamps President’s Scholarship, Georgia Tech

Publications

Preprints

P1. Saad-Falcon, Jon et al. OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices. 2026. Blog: https://scalingintelligence.stanford.edu/blogs/openjarvis/ Code: https://github.com/open-jarvis/OpenJarvis

P2. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Narayan, A., Akengin, O., Griffin, W., Shandilya, H., Lafuente, A., Goel, M., Joseph, R., Natarajan, S., Guha, E., Zhu, S., Athiwaratkun, B., Hennessy, J., Mirhoseini, A. & Re, C. Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07885

Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings

C1. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Buchanan, E. K., Chen, M. F., Huang, T.-H., McLaughlin, B., Bhathal, T., Zhu, S., Athiwaratkun, B., Sala, F., Linderman, S., Mirhoseini, A. & Re, C. Weaver: Shrinking the Generation-Verification Gap with Weak Verifiers. NeurIPS 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18203

C2. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Vivek, R., Berrios, W., Naik, N., Franklin, M., Vidgen, B., Singh, A., Kiela, D. & Mehri, S. LMUnit: Fine-grained Evaluation with Natural Language Unit Tests. EMNLP 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13091

C3. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Lafuente Gamarra, A., Natarajan, S., Maru, N., Todorov, H., Guha, E., Buchanan, E. K., Chen, M., Guha, N., Re, C. & Mirhoseini, A. Archon: An Architecture Search Framework for Inference-Time Techniques. ICML 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15254 Also: ICLR 2025, Scaling Self-Improving Foundation Models (SSI FM), Oral Presentation.

C4. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Fu, D. Y., Arora, S., Guha, N. & Re, C. Benchmarking and Building Long-Context Retrieval Models with LoCo and M2-BERT. ICML 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07440

C5. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Barrow, J., Siu, A., Nenkova, A., Yoon, S., Rossi, R. A. & Dernoncourt, F. PDFTriage: Question Answering over Long, Structured Documents. EMNLP Industry 2024. https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-industry.13.pdf

C6. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Khattab, O., Potts, C. & Zaharia, M. ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems. NAACL 2024, Oral Presentation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09476

C7. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Khattab, O., Santhanam, K., Florian, R., Roukos, S., Sultan, M. A., Sil, A., Zaharia, M. & Potts, C. UDAPDR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via LLM Prompting and Distillation of Rerankers. EMNLP 2023.

C8. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Singh, A., Soldaini, L., D’Arcy, M., Cohan, A. & Downey, D. Embedding Recycling for Language Models. EACL 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04993

C9. Santhanam*, K., Saad-Falcon*, Jon, Franz, M., Khattab, O., Sil, A., Florian, R., Sultan, M. A., Roukos, S., Zaharia, M. & Potts, C. Moving Beyond Downstream Task Accuracy for Information Retrieval Benchmarking. ACL Findings 2023.

C10. Lahav, D., Saad-Falcon, Jon, Kuehl, B., Johnson, S., Parasa, S., Shomron, N., Chau, D. H., Yang, D., Horvitz, E., Weld, D. S. & Hope, T. A Search Engine for Discovery of Scientific Challenges and Directions. AAAI 2022, Oral Presentation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13751

C11. Santhanam*, K., Khattab*, O., Saad-Falcon, Jon, Potts, C. & Zaharia, M. ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction. NAACL 2022. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01488

C12. Li, K., Yang, H., Upadhayay, A., Zhou, Z., Saad-Falcon, Jon & Chau, D. H. Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers. IEEE VIS 2021, Best Poster, Honorable Mention.

C13. Shaikh, O., Saad-Falcon, Jon, Wright, A. P., Das, N., Freitas, S., Asensio, O. I. & Chau, D. H. EnergyVis: Interactively Tracking and Exploring Energy Consumption for ML Models. CHI LBW 2021.

C14. Shaikh, O., Chen, J., Saad-Falcon, Jon, Chau, D. H. & Yang, D. Examining the Ordering of Rhetorical Strategies in Persuasive Requests. EMNLP Findings 2020.

C15. Saad-Falcon, Jon, Shaikh, O., Wang, Z. J., Wright, A. P., Richardson, S. & Chau, D. H. Mapping Researchers with PeopleMap. IEEE VIS 2020, Best Poster, Honorable Mention. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00091


Invited Talks

T1. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI. EE292P: Atoms, Bits, and National Interest (ABNI), Stanford University. Feb. 2026. T2. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI. Two Sigma. Jan. 2026. T3. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI. MBZUAI Speech and NLP Symposium. Jan. 2026. T4. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Weaver: Shrinking the Generation-Verification Gap with Weak Verifiers. Measuring Intelligence Summit at PyTorch Conference. Oct. 2025. T5. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Weaver: Shrinking the Generation-Verification Gap with Weak Verifiers. Together AI. Jul. 2025. T6. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Archon: An Architecture Search Framework for Inference-Time Techniques. LLMs Meet Data Processing Workshop, UC Berkeley. May 2025. T7. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Archon: An Architecture Search Framework for Inference-Time Techniques. Databricks. Feb. 2025. T8. Saad-Falcon, Jon. Archon: An Architecture Search Framework for Inference-Time Techniques. Contextual AI. Oct. 2024.


Mentorship

Current Mentees

2024 – present Hangoo Kang, Hannah Gao, Harsh Singh, Matthew Hart, Orhun Akengin, Tanvir Bhathal, Tarun Suresh

Past Mentees

Adrian Lafuente Gamarra (now Salesforce), Brendan McLaughlin (now Reflection AI), Herumb Shandilya (now Mixed Bread), Robby Manihani (now Pace), Wes Griffin (Stanford)


Teaching

Autumn 2025 Teaching Assistant, CS 224V: Conversational Virtual Assistants with Deep Learning, Stanford University
Winter 2025 Teaching Assistant, CS329A: Self-Improving Agents, Stanford University

Service & Community

Academic Service

2025 Reviewer, NeurIPS 2025
2024 Reviewer, EMNLP 2024
2024 Reviewer, ICML 2024
2022 Reviewer, NAACL 2022
2020 Reviewer, EMNLP 2020
2020 Reviewer, ACL 2020

Leadership & Community Engagement

2025 – present | SoE Dean’s Graduate Student Advisory Council (DGSAC), Chair for Computer Science, Stanford University Built first centralized database of fellowships, RA/CA, and internship opportunities across 9 departments with SoE leadership. Connected 30+ students with fellowships, 50+ with internships, and 40+ with RA placements in 2025-26.

2021 – 2022 | Georgia Tech Venture Capital Fund, Co-founder and Student Director Collaborated with Georgia Tech president’s office and alumni association to establish first GT-backed VC fund. Created educational curriculum for teaching 40+ students. Raised an inaugural $10+ million early-stage fund.

2020 – 2022 | Georgia Tech Computer Science Outreach Club, Founding Member and Volunteer Developed coding workshops and lectures to teach 50+ underprivileged youth from Atlanta-area high schools.


Other Experience

2020 | Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs, Global Investment Research (New York City, NY) Used quantitative techniques and NLP tools for company valuation. Collaborated with traders and external clients.


Last updated: April 2026