The Dubai AI Festival 2025 is proud to welcome Matt White, Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation and General Manager of AI at the Linux Foundation, as a featured speaker. A global advocate for open-source AI and a pioneer in establishing industry-wide standards, White brings nearly three decades of experience driving collaboration and innovation at the core of the AI ecosystem.
With leadership roles across telecom, media, gaming, and robotics, and deep involvement in international standards and research communities, White’s presence marks a key moment in the festival’s focus on trustworthy, interoperable, and inclusive AI development.
Championing Open AI Through Community and Collaboration
At the Linux Foundation, White spearheads initiatives that empower developers, researchers, and companies to build and scale AI systems through open frameworks and shared standards. As Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation, he plays a central role in stewarding one of the world’s most widely used machine learning libraries, enabling global adoption and continued evolution of responsible, high-performance AI tooling.
His contributions also include:
- Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, where he helps shape research and policy in robotics and intelligent systems
- Director of the Generative AI Commons, focused on community-developed standards and ethical frameworks for generative AI
- Chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum, a key global coalition dedicated to interoperability across immersive environments, AI, and simulation technologies
These roles collectively position White as a bridge between industry, academia, and civil society—working to ensure that the future of AI is open, safe, and collaborative.
From Expert Systems to Generative AI: A Career at the Frontier
With a technical journey that began with expert systems in the early AI era, White has evolved his focus to machine learning at the intersection of simulations, robotics, and multi-sensory learning. His work today explores how generative AI models can augment human creativity, power immersive experiences, and drive AI-native interfaces for the metaverse and beyond.
His unique blend of research depth, community leadership, and systems thinking makes him one of the most respected voices in the open AI movement.
Keynote at Dubai AI Festival 2025: “The Open AI Stack: Trust, Innovation, and Standards at Scale”
At the Dubai AI Festival 2025, Matt White will deliver a keynote titled:
“The Open AI Stack: Building Safe, Scalable Intelligence Through Standards and Collaboration.”
His session will explore:
- The future of PyTorch and its role in global AI development
- Open-source models for scaling AI safely and transparently
- The importance of AI standards, interoperability, and governance frameworks
- The convergence of AI, simulations, and the metaverse—and the need for unified ecosystems
This talk will be essential for developers, ecosystem leaders, policymakers, and enterprises working to align their AI strategies with openness, resilience, and ethical alignment.
Matt White’s keynote at Dubai AI Festival 2025 underscores a powerful truth: the future of AI will be shaped not only by breakthroughs—but by the communities, standards, and values that guide how those breakthroughs are shared.
