Maybe the Puppets Were Right All Along

D. Sculley is a machine learning researcher, practitioner, and longtime builder of large-scale AI systems. Over the course of his career, he has worked at the intersection of machine learning research, production engineering, and organizational practice, with a particular focus on what it takes to make AI systems reliable and useful in the real world. He held a variety of research, engineering, and leadership roles at Google. He was the CEO of Kaggle for several years, working to bring that community into the modern age of Generative AI with a focus on empirical rigor and testing at scale. Most recently, he spent time at OpenAI working on safety for frontier AI systems, and with a particular emphasis on AI sycophancy and the intersection of AI and mental health. He is currently on

His interests span the rapidly changing practice of AI engineering: how teams should evaluate increasingly capable models, how traditional MLOps changes in the era of foundation models and agents, and how to build systems that remain understandable, testable, and maintainable as the underlying technology evolves.

Outside of his professional work, he is an active artist and roboticist exploring the intersection of AI, physical machines, and human interaction.