I'm Brian Johnson, an engineer based in San Francisco. I'm a Staff Engineer in applied AI and research at Tavus.io, an AI humans company. I'm also a drone pilot, a photographer, a fashion designer, a Youtuber, and an angler (trout and rivers).
Sparrow-1 is an audio-native model that enables AI to respond with natural conversational timing. Instead of using silence-based endpoint detection, it continuously models conversational floor ownership at the frame level, achieving 100% precision with median latency of 55ms.
How modern transformer models like RT-DETR and YOLOv11, combined with SAM3 segmentation and vision-language models, are revolutionizing waste management from the sky. A complete backend rebuild delivers new capabilities for field crews.
On bridging the gap between experience levels, pattern recognition in engineering leadership, and how teams can learn to see what senior engineers see before it's too late.
AI is not an alien visitation. It's a mirror. Drawing on Nietzsche's amor fati, this essay explores what it means to actively affirm the transformation AI represents—not as passive acceptance, but as creative participation in shaping what comes next.
Discussing how Tavus created real-time AI avatars with sub-second response times that listen, see, and respond naturally.
Keynote presentation on building real-time conversational video AI at GitHub SF.
Co-presented with Chad Bailey (Daily/Pipecat) on building real-time conversational video AI using the open-source Pipecat framework and Tavus.
How will we leverage great wisdom to create great AI? As a dedicated AI enthusiast, I often find myself reflecting on the profound nature of this technology. I asked ChatGPT4 to help me think through this with help from some of the great thinkers in history, finally landing on quotes from Camus, Acton, and Einstein.
Looking to get the magic of graphql/queries.js,mutations.js,... back?
In ten years, I want to see a world where...
A deep dive into the Aerbits platform architecture.
