Stephen Hood

Stephen Hood is a co-founder of Telepath, where he is developing adaptive interfaces for personal agents. His career spans social bookmarking, collaborative storytelling, and Mozilla’s effort to make powerful AI models run privately on ordinary computers.

Earlier, Hood oversaw search research and development at Yahoo, led Delicious, and co-founded Blockboard and Storium. He originally prototyped Storium to play storytelling games with distant friends, then developed it into a collaborative-writing platform with Josh Whiting. In 2020, Hood and Whiting co-authored research on machine-assisted storytelling that examined how human writers revise AI-generated narrative suggestions.

At Mozilla, Hood served as principal open-source AI lead and helped shape Mozilla Builders. He championed llamafile, which combines model weights and an inference runtime in a portable executable. Lead developer Justine Tunney drove its underlying portability and performance engineering; Hood emphasized accessible distribution, private on-device execution, and reducing dependence on expensive GPUs and centralized providers. He also backed sqlite-vec, an SQLite vector-search extension created by independent developer Alex Garcia.

• Personal computing should adapt to human intent. Hood envisions AI-native interfaces that respond directly to users’ goals instead of forcing tasks into predetermined applications and workflows.
• Local AI protects user agency. Running models on widely available CPUs makes capable systems more accessible while keeping personal information under users’ control. His work with Tunney also frames open-source development as a counterweight to concentrated AI infrastructure.
• Creative systems should preserve human judgment. His Storium research treated generated prose as material for people to revise, anticipating his broader interest in technology that augments creative decision-making.

At Telepath, Hood reunited with Whiting and co-founder Rupert Manfredi. In June 2026, he introduced Television, a visual workspace that gives personal agents interfaces beyond chat.