Alexandre de Brébisson

I'm the co-founder and CTO of Strange Attractor, where we're building YouSquared, an AI secretary that answers calls, texts, and books appointments 24/7.

Prior to that, I was founding CEO of Lyrebird.ai, where we pioneered voice cloning and created the first complete deepfake — before the term existed. We were backed by Andreessen Horowitz, RedPoint Ventures and YCombinator (S17). Realizing we couldn't prevent such technologies from developing, we introduced them in a responsible way, raising public awareness through respectful viral videos and ensuring that users could only clone their own voice. We were the first AI startup to establish an ethics statement, and we believe that we have substantially mitigated the potential harm posed by deepfakes. We also partnered with the ALS associations to help patients who have lost the ability to speak regain their voices. Over 500,000 people cloned their voice through our services. Lyrebird merged with Descript in 2019.

I studied as a PhD student at the LISA/MILA lab under the joint supervision of Professors Pascal Vincent and Yoshua Bengio, working on making large models faster to train and run. I introduced an early linear attention mechanism (2016), a precursor of today's linear Transformers, as well as Z-normalization (2016), published a few months before Layer Norm. I also won the Taxi Kaggle competition and received the first Antidote scholarship. I dropped out in 2017 to start Lyrebird.