Research and product · Head of Pre-training
Nick Joseph
Joined OpenAI for its safety team, then followed its safety leads out eight months later. He has been at Anthropic since January 2021.
“after, like, eight months, basically everyone I worked with—all the safety leads—left, which, uh, yeah, invited me to go to Anthropic. And that was sort of the reason I joined OpenAI in the first place—because I cared about AI safety and wanted to work with them. So then I went with them to join Anthropic pretty much right when it started.”
Sources1ycombinator.com
- Role
- Head of Pre-training
- Joined Anthropic
- 2021
- Before Anthropic
- OpenAI
Career
- Anthropic
- Head of Pre-trainingCurrent
- Head of Training
- Member of Technical StaffJan 2021
- OpenAI
- Member of Technical StaffMay 2020 – Jan 2021
- Vicarious AI
- Research EngineerDec 2017 – May 2020
Education
- Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Harvard University, 2017
Sources1linkedin.com
Lesser-known facts
- Interned at GiveWell and first planned a career fighting poverty.
- First job: training computer-vision models for robots at Vicarious.
- Was one of the 11 people who left OpenAI to launch Anthropic.
- Studied computer science at Harvard.
- Worked on scaling laws for code generation on OpenAI's foresight team.
- Argues the bottlenecks in AI progress are people and time, not data or compute.
- Says Anthropic's responsible scaling policy avoids costly precautions before they are needed and aligns commercial incentives with safety.
- Welcomed Andrej Karpathy to his pretraining team in May 2026 to build a group using Claude to accelerate pretraining research.
