Ed Newton-Rex

Ed Newton-Rex is one of the world’s leading experts and speakers on Generative AI. He is one of only a handful of people to have founded and sold a Generative AI company, and has a breadth of experience working at a senior level for social media giants. He is the CEO of Fairly Trained, a non-profit he founded in 2024 that certifies generative AI companies for fairer training data practices.

Having graduated top of his year in Music at Cambridge University, Newton-Rex founded Jukedeck in 2010, one of the first AI music generation startups. Jukedeck’s technology was used to create more than a million original pieces of music, and won a number of awards, including a Cannes Innovation Lion. In 2019, the company was acquired by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.

At ByteDance, Newton-Rex first led the AI music lab, then ran Product in Europe for TikTok, working on the world-renowned AI recommendation algorithm. At Snapchat, he was Chief Product Officer for Voisey, a music creation app that made it easy to make and collaborate on music, which led to record deals for a number of its users.

He later led the Audio team at Stability AI, where his team’s product, Stable Audio, was named one of TIME Magazine’s best inventions of the year in 2023. He is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a composer of choral music, which gives him a unique perspective on the impact AI will have - and is already having - on the creative industries. He was a co-organizer and judge of the first international AI Song Contest, and is a mentor on the startup program at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Newton-Rex was named one of Business Insider’s 30 most creative people in UK tech, and one of Sifted’s 20 generative AI ‘power players’ in Europe. He has made a number of media appearances discussing AI and creativity, including on the BBC, and has spoken on the topic at a range of conferences including TEDx, Mobile World Congress and Slush.