# Timothée Lacroix

> Timothée Lacroix is the French engineer, researcher and co-founder who serves as CTO of Mistral AI. After studying computer science and machine learning in Paris, completing doctoral research on tensor methods, and spending eight years at Facebook AI Research and Meta, he helped start Mistral in 2023. His remit now spans product, research infrastructure, forward-deployed engineering, and data-center infrastructure - the systems that turn model research into useful, deployable software.

- **Role:** Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Mistral AI
- **Organizations:** Mistral AI, Meta, Facebook AI Research, École Normale Supérieure, Université Paris-Saclay, École des Ponts ParisTech
- **Nationality:** French
- **Education:** Computer science, École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Master’s in Mathematics, Vision and Learning, Université Paris-Saclay, PhD, tensor decompositions for knowledge-base completion, Université Paris-Est / École des Ponts ParisTech
- **Known for:** Co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and serves as its CTO., Spent eight years at Facebook AI Research and Meta, working on large-scale machine learning systems and language models., Co-authored the 2023 LLaMA paper and Mistral papers including Mistral 7B, Mixtral of Experts and Pixtral 12B.

## Career timeline

- **2015** — Graduated in computer science from ENS rue d’Ulm and began working as an engineer at Facebook AI Research in New York.
- **2016-2019** — Conducted doctoral research in collaboration with École des Ponts on tensor factorization and knowledge-base completion while at Facebook AI Research.
- **2018** — Co-authored ‘Canonical Tensor Decomposition for Knowledge Base Completion,’ published at ICML.
- **2019** — Co-authored ‘PyTorch-BigGraph,’ a large-scale graph embedding system, published at SysML.
- **2020** — Completed his doctoral thesis on tensor decompositions for knowledge-base completion and co-authored an ICLR paper on temporal knowledge bases.
- **2022** — Co-authored work on neural theorem proving, including HyperTree Proof Search.
- **2023** — Co-authored the LLaMA research paper, left Meta after eight years, and co-founded Mistral AI with Arthur Mensch and Guillaume Lample.
- **2023-09** — Mistral AI released Mistral 7B, with Lacroix among the paper’s authors.
- **2024** — Co-authored the Mixtral of Experts and Pixtral 12B technical papers while leading Mistral’s engineering organization.
- **2025-2026** — As CTO, led technical teams spanning product, research infrastructure and forward-deployed engineering, with data-center infrastructure added to his remit.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and serves as its CTO.
- Spent eight years at Facebook AI Research and Meta, working on large-scale machine learning systems and language models.
- Co-authored the 2023 LLaMA paper and Mistral papers including Mistral 7B, Mixtral of Experts and Pixtral 12B.
- Completed a doctorate focused on tensor decompositions for knowledge-base completion.
- Co-authored PyTorch-BigGraph, a system for learning embeddings from graphs containing billions of entities and trillions of edges.
- Built and leads Mistral AI engineering functions across products, research infrastructure, customer deployment and compute infrastructure.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — At Mistral’s AI Now Summit in Paris, Lacroix described his CTO remit as product, research infrastructure, forward-deployed engineering and, increasingly, data-center infrastructure.
- **2026-05** — In a BFM Business interview, he reflected on Mistral’s first three years, including choosing the company name and distributing its early models through torrent links.
- **2026-03** — Mistral added Forge to its public company timeline, extending the customization and deployment stack overseen by its technical organization.
- **2025-07** — Lacroix was among the authors of Voxtral, Mistral’s speech-understanding model family.
- **2025-06** — Mistral launched Mistral Compute and Mistral Code, later renamed Vibe, expanding the infrastructure and product layers within Lacroix’s remit.

## Links

- Website: https://mistral.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothee-lacroix-59517977/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/tlacroix6
- GitHub: https://github.com/timlacroix

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/timoth-e-lacroix
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26