My name is Haytham ElFadeel. I’m a self-taught Machine Learning Scientist, Engineering Manager, Entrepreneur, and former alpine climber and cyclist.
From 2009 to 2017, I ran my startup, Kngine Inc., which aimed to solve the challenge of automatic knowledge acquisition, representation, and comprehension—basiclly ChatGPT before the GPT. My work focused on open-domain question answering, web-scale knowledge extraction, organization and representation, and natural language understanding. In 2017, Kngine Inc. was acquired by Samsung.
Before founding Kngine, I contributed to diverse research areas, including online handwriting recognition for Arabic, multilingual named entity recognition (NER), multi-kernel operating systems, and the development of a parallelism SDK for programmers.
From 2017 to 2020, following Kngine's acquisition, I led a research organization at Samsung Research as a Senior Engineering Manager and Principal Machine Learning Engineer, focusing on natural language understanding, question answering, and machine translation.
From 2020 to 2022, I worked at Meta as a Machine Learning Scientist and Senior Engineering Manager, contributing to advancements in machine comprehension and natural language understanding.
From 2022 to 2024, I served as a Senior Engineering Manager at Cruise (autonomous vehicles), where I led a three-team organization:
- Scenario Generation – using ML (e.g., Diffusion, GPT) to generate scenarios for uncovering AV issues and training the AV policy.
- Agent Simulation – responsible for generating controllable road-user behavior.
- Applied Research – focused on the intersection of computer vision, simulation, and reinforcement learning (e.g., RLHF, end-to-end perception, NeRF, 3D skeletons and animation).
Currently, I’m on a sabbatical, conducting research in advanced ML/LLMs—exploring topics such as autonomous agents, reasoning in LLMs, RLVR, and reinforcement learning in LLM pretraining.
Outside of my professional endeavors, I enjoy sports. I was a semi-professional cyclist from 2015 to 2020 and a semi-professional alpine climber from 2020 to 2025.
Climbing Photos (from 2020 to 2024):
Everest - 2025:
Ama Dablam - 2024:
