Benjamin is an R&D ML Engineer, currently working at Answer.AI. His interests are focused on NLP and, especially, Information Retrieval. He has been involved in multiple projects with a focus on broadening the access to state-of-the-art retrieval methods, such as RAGatouille and the rerankers library. Recently, Ben also co-led the ModernBERT project, which has modernized the widely used BERT backbone. Previously, Ben has worked at legaltech companies LexisNexis and Jus Mundi, and he’s currently interested in exploring the new possibilities that LLMs open up for retrieval.

Hamel is a machine learning engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.