Robert McHardy
Official Role
Pre-training Lead at poolside.
Official Bio
Team and tech lead for pre-training at poolside, where he trains large language models for code. Recently led the pre-training of Laguna XS.2 and M.1, poolside's first two public open-weight models. Before that, Robert worked as a Senior Researcher at AssemblyAI where he trained multilingual speech models, and previously built AI for cancer and infectious-disease research at InstaDeep and BioNTech's joint lab. MSc in Machine Learning from UCL.
Scheduled Sessions
- 2026 06 29 robert mchardy the messy reality of scale synthetic data and pre training at poolside — The Messy Reality of Scale: Synthetic Data and Pre-Training at Poolside (2026-06-29, 11:10am-11:30am)