Frank Portman

Frank Portman serves as Chief Technology Officer at Yobi AI[1]. He maintains a presence on the social media platform X[2].

Insights & ideas

Frank Portman argues that responsible AI development starts with rejecting the default premise that scale requires compromising user privacy. He describes Yobi as building foundation models from real user behavioral signals, but only where partners can obtain genuine consent from end users, paired with financial compensation and clear ownership over whose data is used and who benefits from it [1]. A recurring theme is deliberate self-restriction: Yobi refuses to operate in financial underwriting or health use cases specifically to avoid enabling biased or unfair outcomes, even though these are legally permissible verticals, and it vets prospective customers with the same rigor its data partners apply to it [1].

He also emphasizes technical safeguards against demographic bias, stating that Yobi never feeds demographic data into its models and does not want its models to predict such information, going further by adding adversarial objectives that actively penalize the model for being good at inferring demographics, even when clients in advertising ask for that capability [1].

Experience

1. CTO

   YobiNov 2022 to Present
2. Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

   TwitterSep 2018 to Nov 2022
3. Machine Learning

   Uber Advanced Technologies GroupNov 2017 to Sep 2018
4. Data Science

   Uber Advanced Technologies GroupJun 2016 to Nov 2017
5. Machine Learning

   Edmunds.comJun 2014 to Jun 2016
6. Course Instructor

   General AssemblyAug 2015 to Nov 2015
7. Co-Founder

   UndisclosedMar 2012 to Jun 2014

Education

• Rice University · BS Mathematics, BS Statistics

Media & appearances

• 3280: Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at Scale - YouTube

  Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, discusses how his company builds foundation models based on real user signals with explicit user consent and financial compensation. He explains Yobi's approach to privacy-preserving AI infrastructure, their refusal to work in sensitive regulated verticals like financial underwriting and health, and their practice of vetting both data partners and customers to ensure responsible use of their SaaS products.

• Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at ScaleTech Talks Daily · May 17, 2025
• Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at Scale - Apple Podcasts
• 3280: Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at Scale
• 3280: Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at Scale - iHeart
• 3280: Yobi and the Future of Ethical AI at Scale
• Summary of Why intent prediction needs more than an LLM

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