Mike Conover

CEO & Co-founder at Brightwave

Panellist

Mike Conover is the CEO and co-founder of Brightwave, is the AI-driven research and diligence platform that transforms unstructured financial data into clear, actionable insights. A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, Mike established Databricks' language model engineering practice and created their first open-source LLM called Dolly. This groundbreaking work in April 2023 was the first to demonstrate that open-source technologies could achieve ChatGPT-like capabilities, helping democratize AI development. Mike has built AI systems and products for more than twenty years, including tours of duty at Workday as Director of Financials Machine Learning, SkipFlag (acquired by Workday), and LinkedIn. He has a PhD in complexity science from Indiana University focused on understanding large-scale patterns in human society. His work has been featured in Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Hacker News, Nature Communications, MIT Technology Review and on NPR.