Sholto Douglas

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Member of Technical StaffFeb 2025 – present
2. 
   DeepMind

   • Research EngineerSep 2022 – Jan 2025
3. M
   McKinsey & Company

   • McKinsey DigitalAug 2020 – Jun 2022
4. 
   Australian Centre for Field Robotics

   • Honours researcherJan 2019 – Dec 2019
   • Research AssistantAug 2016 – Feb 2017

Education

• Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronic Space) + Bachelor of Commerce (Business Analytics), University of Sydney, 2020
• Bachelor Exchange, Interdisciplinary Information Sciences - Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, 2017-2018

Lesser-known facts

• Studied mechatronic space engineering at the University of Sydney.
• Noam Brown called him "one of the most important people behind Gemini's success" after just 1.5 years in the field.
• Wrote the first version of the JAX scaling textbook "How To Scale Your Model."
• Co-authored "Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference" (2022), cited more than 1,200 times.
• Placed 14th of 189 at an FIE Grand Prix in Turin, the best Australian men's foil result in 13 years.
• Worked on robot manipulation learned from self-supervised play data before moving into language models.
• Predicted in December 2025 that continual learning "gets solved in a satisfying way" in 2026.

Known for

• How Does Claude 4 Think? (2025)
• Sonnet 4.5 & the AI Plateau Myth (2025)

Honors

2017 New Colombo Plan Scholar

Interviews and talks

• Dwarkesh Podcast with Trenton Bricken: Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? (2025)dwarkesh.com
• Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron on Claude 4 and AI coworkers (2025)youtube.com
• No Priors Ep. 144: predictions for AI in 2026 (2025)youtube.com