# Swan Htet Aung

> AI product leader who built the first commercial Natural Language Understanding system for the Burmese language (2016), founded EXPA.AI (100M+ conversations for Samsung, Unilever, Coca-Cola), and leads Burmese.AI, Myanmar's leading open-source AI initiative. EB-1A visa recipient for extraordinary ability in artificial intelligence (2025). Originally from Yangon, Myanmar; based in Austin, Texas.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.swanhtetaung.com/): Personal homepage with career timeline, key work, and current focus areas.
- [Building AI Where the Playbook Doesn't Exist](https://www.swanhtetaung.com/essay.html): Long-form essay on building AI for low-resource languages, the tokenization tax on non-Latin scripts, and why the field's biggest opportunity is missing infrastructure.

## Key Facts

- In 2016, Swan Htet Aung developed the first commercial NLU system for the Burmese language — 54 million speakers, zero existing NLP infrastructure, no tokenizer, no training data.
- Founded EXPA.AI, a conversational AI platform that processed over 100 million conversations for enterprises including Samsung, Unilever, and Coca-Cola across 1,500+ businesses in Southeast Asian emerging markets.
- Founded Burmese.AI, Myanmar's leading open-source artificial intelligence initiative building foundational tools and datasets for Burmese-language AI.
- In 2025, granted the EB-1A visa for extraordinary ability in artificial intelligence by the United States government.
- One of Myanmar's first mobile developers (2012).
- First to scale Burmese conversational AI across Southeast Asian enterprises (2021).

## Links

- Website: https://www.swanhtetaung.com
- Also: https://5w4n.com
- EXPA.AI: https://expa.ai
- Burmese.AI: https://burmese.ai
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/swanhtetaung
- GitHub: https://github.com/swanhtet1992
- Email: sha@5w4n.com

## Optional

- [Full content for LLMs](https://www.swanhtetaung.com/llms-full.txt)