# Ben Mann

Co-founders · Labs co-lead at Anthropic · joined 2021

One of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI. His own site calls him a software engineer, tinkerer and aspiring mad scientist.

Full profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people/ben-mann

**At Anthropic:**
- Feb 2021 – present: Member of Technical Staff
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-mann)

**Career before Anthropic:**
- Jul 2019 – Dec 2020: OpenAI, Member of Technical Staff
- Jun 2018 – May 2019: Unnamed startup, Founder
- Nov 2017 – Jun 2018: Google, Senior Software Engineer
- Jul 2017 – Oct 2017: Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Software Engineer
- Mar 2017 – May 2017: OpenAI, Software Engineer
- Jul 2013 – Sep 2016: Google, Senior Software Engineer
- Sep 2011 – Jul 2013: Google, Software Engineer
- May 2010 – Aug 2010: Google, Software Engineer
- Sep 2008 – Jan 2009: Columbia University, Robotics Group, Research Associate
- Jun 2006 – Dec 2006: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Research Assistant
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-mann)

**Education:**
- Columbia University
Sources: [1](https://observer.com/2026/04/anthropic-top-executives-after-labs-launch/)

**Lesser-known facts:**
- Graduated magna cum laude from Columbia in 2011. [1](https://yespress.io/benjamin-ben-mann)
- Built Webtendo, which turned a laptop into a game console and phones into controllers, and chased latency under 30 milliseconds. [1](https://yespress.io/benjamin-ben-mann)
- Was one of three co-first authors of the 2020 GPT-3 paper, listed second after Tom Brown. [1](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/benjamin_mann)
- Worked on infrastructure, efficiency and safety for GPT-3 while at OpenAI. [1](https://aiconference.com/speakers/ben-mann/)
- Created Anthropic's Labs team in 2024 to explore new product ideas; it went on to build Claude Code and the Model Context Protocol. [1](https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-labs-team-ai-innovation-ipo-2026-9)
- Describes himself as Anthropic's "engineer of last resort." [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-mann)
- Puts his 50th percentile estimate for reaching some kind of superintelligence at around 2028. [1](https://lifearchitect.ai/mann/)

**Research papers before Anthropic:**
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020), author 2 of 31: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling (2020), author 12 of 19: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14701

**Interviews and talks:**
- [Lenny's Podcast interview with the Anthropic co-founder (2025)](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropic-co-founder-benjamin-mann)

**Known for:**
- GPT-3 (architect)
Sources: [1](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropic-co-founder-benjamin-mann)

Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-10-18. Everyone at Anthropic: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people