Nick Frosst

Overview

Nick Frosst is a Canadian machine-learning researcher, born on 5 January 1993 ^[1]. His working life has run along two tracks at once: research on machine learning inside a large corporate lab, and singing in an indie rock band that grew out of his student years ^[1][3].

Education

He studied at the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and cognitive science in 2015 ^[1][3]. Cognitive science is the study of how minds — human or artificial — represent information and use it to reason; paired with computer science, it is a common route into machine learning, the branch of computing in which programs improve at a task by learning from examples rather than by following rules written out by hand. At Toronto he studied alongside a group of computer-science students with whom he would later make music ^[1].

At Google Brain

From 2016 to 2020 Frosst worked as a machine-learning researcher in the Toronto office of Google Brain ^[1]. He was one of Geoffrey Hinton's earliest hires there, and the University of Toronto describes him as Hinton's first employee at the Toronto lab ^[1][3]. Work of that kind is mostly research: reading and writing papers, designing and running experiments on neural networks — models built from many simple units connected in layers, whose connection strengths are adjusted during training — and turning the results into methods that other teams can use.

Cohere

In 2019 he co-founded Cohere in Toronto together with Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang ^[1][2][4]. Cohere is a natural language processing company based in Toronto ^[4]. Natural language processing is the engineering side of getting computers to work with human language: retrieving and sorting text, translating between languages, summarising long documents, answering questions. Founding the company in Toronto kept Frosst in the same city as the university where he had studied and the Google Brain office where he had worked ^[1][4].

Good Kid

Frosst is the lead vocalist of Good Kid, the indie rock band he formed in 2015 with fellow University of Toronto computer-science students ^[1]. The university describes the group as an indie pop rock band ^[3]. That a machine-learning research scientist also fronts a band is unusual enough that the university's own profile of him lists both roles side by side ^[3].

Place in the field

His career links several steps that later became a recognisable route in machine learning: study at a university, a research post at a large corporate lab, and then a founding role at a company working on language technology ^[1][2][4]. All of these steps happened in Toronto — his degree, his time in the Google Brain office there, and the founding of Cohere, which is headquartered in the same city ^[1][2][4].