Torsten Scholak
Leads the Foundation Model Lab at ServiceNow Research; technical co-lead of the Apriel open-weight models
- Leads the Foundation Model Lab at ServiceNow Research; co-founder of the SLAM initiative, ServiceNow12
Torsten Scholak leads the Foundation Model Lab at ServiceNow Research and co-founded the ServiceNow Language Model (SLAM) initiative, which develops the Apriel family of open-weight models for enterprise agentic tasks. Scholak was technical co-lead for pre-training and architecture on Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, is listed among the leads of Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker, and led the Super Apriel project. Earlier work includes the PICARD constrained-decoding method for text-to-SQL parsing and the Hasktorch library.15683
Career
Scholak held a postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto before moving to industry at Unata and then Element AI. Element AI was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021.1
At ServiceNow Research, Scholak leads the Foundation Model Lab and co-founded the ServiceNow Language Model (SLAM) initiative. Scholak's current focus is the Apriel family of open-weight models built for enterprise agentic tasks and efficient inference.12
Research and open-source work
With Nathan Schucher and Dzmitry Bahdanau, Scholak wrote PICARD (2021), a method for constraining autoregressive decoding from language models by parsing incrementally, applied to text-to-SQL parsing. Scholak also co-organized the Deep Learning for Code workshop at ICLR 2022 and 2023 and helped build Hasktorch, a library for GPU-accelerated machine learning in Haskell.31
Scholak was technical co-lead for pre-training and architecture on Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker (2025), co-authored the release post for Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker (2025), and led the Super Apriel project (2026), whose paper lists Scholak as a core contributor. Scholak is also a co-author of the StarCoder 2 paper (2024).5689
Work
Apriel model familyOpen weights
Technical co-lead for pre-training and architecture on Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, and co-founder of the ServiceNow initiative that develops the Apriel models.51
Apriel-1.6-15B-ThinkerOpen weights
Co-author of the December 2025 release post and listed under the model's leads and management.6
SuperApriel-15B-InstructOpen weights
Led the Super Apriel project, a 15B-parameter supernet whose decoder layers each offer several trained mixer choices, contributing to its design, training and serving code and placement optimization.78
Career timeline
Sep 2021
Posted PICARD, on constrained decoding for text-to-SQL parsing, as first author.3
Feb 2024
Co-authored the StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2 paper.9
Oct 2025
Served as technical co-lead for pre-training and architecture on Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker.45
Dec 2025
Co-authored the release post for Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker.6
Apr 2026
Led the Super Apriel project, posted as a paper with Scholak among three core contributors.78
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Worked at Element AI, which ServiceNow acquired in 2021, Element AI1
Related people
More sourced profiles at the same organization, in the same field, or from the same school.
- Paul SmithAlso at ServiceNow
- Akshita BhagiaLanguage models
- Abdelrahman MohamedAlso from Toronto
- Arthur MenschLanguage models
- Aidan GomezAlso from Toronto
- Barret ZophLanguage models
- Alex GravesAlso from Toronto
- Beren MillidgeLanguage models
- Colin RaffelAlso from Toronto
- Bryan CatanzaroLanguage models
- David HaAlso from Toronto
- Ce ZhangTraining systems
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