Oussama Elachqar

Co-founder, Oumi -- Let's build better AI

I am currently a co-founder at Oumi, where I am working on making frontier AI more open and collaborative. Previously, I was a machine learning engineer & manager in the Apple Health AI team, focusing on Health foundation models. Prior to Apple, I worked at Twitter, Microsoft and Photobox, building production machine learning systems. My projects span large-scale recommendation systems, multimodal conversational agents, handwriting recognition, bias detection, and neural sequence-to-sequence models.

Press

Ex-Google, Apple engineers raise $10M to give AI its 'Linux moment' — GeekWire, 2025

AI Needs Its Linux: Oumi Comes Out of Stealth with an Open Source Vision — AIwire, 2025

La startup Oumi AI, l'ambitieux pari de l'open source — Telquel, 2025

Microsoft launches its AI-powered notetaking app Journal as an official Windows app — Techcrunch, 2022

Microsoft Word's AI wants to rewrite your crappy sentences — TheNextWeb, 2020

Microsoft officially outs another AI chatbot, called Zo — Techcrunch, 2016

Experience

Oumi — 2025-present

Apple, Health AI — 2022-2024

Twitter, Trends & Events — 2021-2022

Microsoft, Applied Sciences Group — 2019-2021

Microsoft Research, NLP Group — 2017-2019

Microsoft, US XiaoIce — 2016-2017

Photobox, Photo Science Team — 2014-2016

Publications

Can a Single Model Master Both Multi-turn Conversations and Tool Use? CoALM: A Unified Conversational Agentic Language Model — ACL, 2025

Do LLMs "know" internally when they follow instructions? — ICLR, 2025

Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals — ICLR, 2024

INSET: Sentence Infilling with INter-SEntential Transformer — ACL, 2020

Contextual Text Style Transfer — Findings of EMNLP, 2020

Multilingual Whispers: Generating Paraphrases with Translation — W-NUT, 2019

Patents

Large-scale training of foundation models for physiological signals from wearable electronic devices — Apple, 2024

Conversation bot discovery and response fusion — Microsoft, 2017

Emotional intelligence for a conversational chatbot — Microsoft, 2017

Parsing an ink document using object-level and stroke-level processing — Microsoft, 2020

Detecting ink gestures based on spatial and image data processing — Microsoft, 2020