Tom Brown

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Co-founder and Chief Compute OfficerCurrent
   • Co-founderJan 2021
2. 
   OpenAI

   • Research Engineering Lead, GPT-3Dec 2018 – Dec 2020
3. 
   Google DeepMind

   • Member of Technical StaffAug 2017 – Nov 2018
4. 
   OpenAI

   • Member of Technical StaffMay 2016 – May 2017
5. G
   Grouper

   • Co-Founder & CTO2012–2015
6. M
   MoPub

   • Founding EngineerFeb 2011 – Nov 2011

Education

• MEng, Course 6 (Computer Science), Course 9 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005-2010

Lesser-known facts

• Co-founded the startup Grouper and was a founding engineer at MoPub before AI.
• Got a B-minus in linear algebra, then taught himself with a Coursera course, Kaggle and the book Linear Algebra Done Right.
• Led research engineering for GPT-3 at OpenAI.
• Built MoPub's early server architecture and scaled its ad-serving API to 1.5 billion monthly impressions.
• Wrote the Grouper matching algorithms behind more than one million drinks across 25 cities before the startup shut down.
• Messaged Greg Brockman as soon as OpenAI was announced offering to help, and was eventually given a job on a StarCraft project.
• Wrote rl-teacher, open-source code for Deep RL from Human Preferences plus a web app for collecting human feedback.
• Struck a 2026 deal to rent SpaceX compute, including the Colossus data center, for $1.25 billion a month.
• Gives this career advice: "Surround yourself with people you want to be like. You'll become more similar to them over time."

Research papers before Anthropic

• Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences2017 · author 3 of 6
• Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences2019 · author 4 of 8
• GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners2020 · author 1 of 31
• Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling2020 · author 8 of 19
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models2020 · author 4 of 10

Known for

• Deep RL from Human Preferences (2017)
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3, 2020)
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020)

Interviews and talks

• Building Anthropic: a conversation with the co-founders (2024)youtube.com