A Breadth of AI Innovation
Dave Palfrey, Mind Mage Chief Scientist, has 15 years' experience of AI innovation. Over a decade ago, as knowledge engineer with Evi, the startup later acquired to power Amazon Alexa, he introduced their first machine learning model. After helping to launch Amazon Alexa in 2014, Dave helped hire and joined Amazon's first UK team of ML scientists. He went on to drive NLP and knowledge graph innovation on many Alexa teams. As Alexa ontologist, Dave modelled everything from local search to fictional worlds. Guiding data strategies for generative AI, he built broad taxonomies for LLM data requirements as well as complex fine-tuning datasets.
A Restless Intellect
A Faustian appetite for knowledge drives Dave into wide-ranging intellectual inquiry. He's published on knowledge graph embeddings, the deaths of philosophers, and nineteenth-century social science. He first played with multidimensional scaling and game-playing AI as a nerdy teenager. He went on to study maths and history at Cambridge University, and philosophy and economics at LSE. He's taught LSE economics classes, given Cambridge lectures in the history of political thought, and taught history at Birkbeck, University of London.
Two things attracted Dave to Mind Mage. First, generative AI in game design will force new shapes of experience on users, developers and designers - and a host of utterly new questions are folded in this opportunity surface. Second, he is convinced by Mind Mage's AI vision, which marries the expressive fluency of LLMs with the persistency of symbolic constraint.
Working for a Less Unequal World
Dave is passionate about challenging inequity and exclusion in the workplace and the wider world. As an Amazon 'bar raiser', chairing over 600 interview panels across varying job roles, he learned to recognize and challenge unconscious bias. He was a persistent voice at Amazon demanding attention be paid to the gender pay gap. He has also tackled systemic bias on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Volunteering with Women Do News in 2024, for example, he added 5,000 new women journalists to Wikidata, reducing global disparities in coverage. He brings these sensitivities to both the content of fictional worlds and the challenges of organizational scaling at Mind Mage.
Writing Outside Work
For two decades Dave's priority outside work has been parenting two daughters. Now they are grown, he is picking up a miscellany of writing projects. He's a leading Wikipedia editor, who has started over 2,000 Wikipedia pages. Where Mind Mage's challenges drive his future writing - e.g., on the history of AI, on the anthropology of games, or the challenges of world-modelling - it will find its place on the company blog. More variegated reflections - whether on literary criticism, the history of affect, or the division of labour - will find an outlet on other channels.
