Vanya Cohen is Blackbird.AI’s Principal AI Scientist. His research and work are focused on applying generative AI to mitigate narrative attacks caused by misinformation and disinformation. Vanya leads the development of Compass by Blackbird.AI, a multimodal LLM-powered agent that analyzes claims made in social media posts, news articles, images, and videos. Vanya has five years of experience working on natural language understanding, reinforcement learning, and computer vision systems, and he has extensive experience training and deploying large language models. Before working at Blackbird.AI, Vanya co-created OpenGPT-2 for OpenAI in 2019, the first open-source replication and public release of OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model, and the OpenWebText dataset, which has been downloaded millions of times. Vanya received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Brown University and is currently on leave from a Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he focused on building agents that can understand complex instructions and environments.