Welcome to Sylvain Combettes’ webpage!

Since September 2025, I have been the co-founding CEO of Formel AI. We build reliable, transparent, and efficient Large Language Models. For this, we leverage the verification capabilities of formal methods, such as the Lean 4 theorem prover.

Previously, I was a Senior ML Product Engineer at Probabl (2024-2025), the startup spin-off from Inria and official operator of scikit-learn, the most popular open-source machine learning Python library. As one of the first employees at Probabl, I was a core developer of the skore library, while also working on product strategy, outreach, and communication. I hold a PhD from ENS Paris-Saclay (2020-2024) on the topic of machine learning applied to time series. From 2021 to 2024, I was a data science lecturer at Ecole Polytechnique Executive Education, Ecole Polytechnique (X-HEC Data Science for Business MScT), and CentraleSupélec Executive Education.

Contact: sylvain.combettes8 [a t] gmail.com

News

• [Sep. 2025] I am the co-founding CEO of Formel AI!

Older news

• [Sep. 3rd, 2024] I started a new job as a Machine Learning Product Engineer at Probabl in Paris, the official brand operator of scikit-learn! More info: my LinkedIn post. For more info about Probabl, I wrote a Notion page.
• [Aug. 28th, 2024] I presented ASTRIDE [PDF] at the EUSIPCO conference in Lyon, France.
• [May 15th, 2024] My co-author Paul Boniol presented the $d_{symb}$ playground [PDF] at the ICDE conference in Utrecht, Netherlands.
• [May 13th, 2024] My PhD’s manuscript is available online [theses.fr / HAL / PDF], as well as the slides of my defense [PDF].
• [May 2nd, 2024] I presented the $d_{symb}$ playground at the Towards a Sustainable Food Supply Chain: Pool, Optimize and Decarbonize Flows using AI conference organized by Califrais and SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence).
• [Apr. 9th, 2024] I presented my PhD work at the Machine Learning and Massive Data Analysis (MLMDA) seminar.
• [Mar. 7th, 2024] I presented the $d_{symb}$ playground at the Entrepreneur First - Pitch Your Thesis: AI edition talk.
• [Feb. 1st, 2024] I started a postdoc at ENS Paris-Saclay, France!
• [Jan. 8th, 2024] I successfully defended my PhD from ENS Paris-Saclay, France!