Bryan McCann

Bryan McCann is the co-founder and CTO of You.com. Previously, he was a Lead Research Scientist at Salesforce Research working on Deep Learning and its applications to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and presented his work directly to customers on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, on behalf of collaboration between Salesforce, Google, and Meta at the Pytorch Developers Conference (and a second time), as well as at broad, business-facing venues like VentureBeat Transform. He authored the first paper and holds the patent on contextualized word vectors, which eventually led to the transfer learning revolution in NLP with BERT and other transformer-based architectures for contextualized word vectors. Other notable work includes early unified models for multi-tasking in NLP, training the largest public and open source language model in the world in 2019, and applying language models to biology in which his team generated proteins that were synthesized by a lab and shown to be as or more effective than those in nature. His work has been cited thousands of times and he has spoken about the cutting edge of NLP and AI at research labs around the world. Bryan’s work comes out of a deep philosophical interest in meaning and the desire to use AI to complement human creativity, inspire new thoughts, and ultimately develop tools for more fulfilling lives. He was the recipient of the 1st ever eVe award at SXSW 2021 for his collaboration with award-winning (and Netflix show writing) author Daniel Kehlmann. He is a regular speaker on topics of literature and AI, poetry and AI, and other crossovers between AI and the arts.