Bryan McCann is co-founder and CTO at you.com, advancing human and AI collaboration.
He previously led AI research in Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP). His work has been cited thousands of times, and he has spoken about the cutting edge of AI and NLP 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 and a more complete understanding of the world.
Bryan is an advisor to and investor in several AI startups as well as coach to technical leaders. He dabbles in poetry, essays on literature, abstract painting, tap dance, weightlifting, and topology. He received his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science (AI) and B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2016.
AI Research
Bryan’s research pushed the field towards unified AI systems instead of task-specific models. He authored the first paper and holds the patent on contextualized word vectors, which led to the transfer learning revolution in NLP and some of the largest improvements in search since Google began.
His second paper laid the groundwork for the field to see language “as a flexible way to specify tasks, inputs, and outputs all as a sequence of symbols” and “demonstrated it was possible to train a single model to infer and perform many different tasks” according to the creators of GPT at OpenAI.
He then trained the largest open-source language model in the world in 2019 with the specific goal of making more controllable and transparent language models. He then leveraged that work to “write proteins” that were synthesized in a lab and shown to be more effective than those in nature. Along the way, he also advanced the state-of-the-art in commonsense reasoning, sentiment analysis, question answering, text classification, summarization, dialogue, and semantic parsing.
His work has been cited thousands of times, and he has spoken about the cutting edge of AI and NLP around the world, to customers on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, on behalf of Salesforce, Google, and Meta at the Pytorch Developers Conference, as well as at broad, business-facing venues and VentureBeat Transform.
Philosophy, Projects, and Interests
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 and a more complete understanding of the world. 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, and speaks on topics of AI and the arts.
His philosophical research started with questions about meaning, existence, and aesthetics while pursuing a philosophy degree at Stanford University. His largest work at the time was a defense of conceptual analysis as a useful tool for learning rather than as a means of discovering truth.
During the first few years of his professional career in AI, he delved into the philosophy of science (mostly Popper and Kuhn), read some of his favorite literature (Italo Calvino’s entire body of work, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Vergil's Aeneid in Latin), and self-studied Latin.
Bryan has a great appreciation for the beauty of mathematics and has more than once been brought to tears of joy in understanding fundamental concepts – most recently while contemplating outside St. Peter's Basilica. The last couple years he’s mostly focused on topology.
He also dabbles in poetry, abstract painting, essays, tap dance, and weightlifting. You’re most likely to find him either in the woods, a gym, or a dance studio on the weekends.
Leadership, Advising, and Investing
Bryan is an advisor to and investor in several startups as well as coach to their leaders. He brings invaluable perspective as a co-founder, CTO, and former researcher building one of the world’s top AI startups. He regularly advises startups on crucial strategic decisions, organizational structure and management, specific technical challenges, day-to-day operations, fundraising. He speaks on his journey as a leader, manager, and operator around the world on stages like Web Summit.