Edo Liberty

Edo Liberty is founder and Chief Scientist of Pinecone, the vector-database company he started in 2019 and led as CEO for six years. He frames the product as long-term memory for AI systems: a place models can store and retrieve meaning at scale, so they are not limited to what fits inside a prompt.

From Yale math to Amazon AI Labs

Liberty earned a B.Sc. in physics and computer science at Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in computer science at Yale, then stayed at Yale as a postdoctoral fellow in applied mathematics. Before Pinecone he was Director of Research at AWS and Head of Amazon AI Labs, where his groups shipped algorithms and systems into SageMaker, OpenSearch, Kinesis, Glue, Rekognition, Personalize, and related services. Earlier he led Yahoo's research lab in New York, working on advertising, search, security, and recommendations. He has taught algorithms in data mining at Tel Aviv University and a course on long-term memory in AI at Princeton.

Founding Pinecone

He founded Pinecone in 2019 to productize vector search as managed infrastructure. On his site he writes that the company "established the vector database category," grew past a hundred employees, raised over $100M, and is used by more than a million engineers. After six years as CEO he moved into the Chief Scientist role to focus on research and product around long-term memory.

On thinking versus knowing

In his 2023 TED AI talk, Liberty separates what models "think" from what they "know," and argues that vector databases form the connective tissue between those modes. That distinction is how he explains why retrieval infrastructure matters for agents and applications that must remember user-specific and enterprise-specific facts over time.