Tom Brown
Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer, Anthropic
Tom Brown is a co-founder of Anthropic and its Chief Compute Officer, leading the organization responsible for securing, scaling and using the company's compute. Before Anthropic, he worked at OpenAI, where he was lead author of the paper introducing GPT-3. He studied computer science and cognitive science at MIT.
Accomplishments
- Co-founded Anthropic; its leadership page lists him as Chief Compute Officer, leading the technical organization responsible for compute (checked October 19, 2026).
- Co-authored the GPT-3 paper, Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020).
Papers & key writings
Links
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METR Review of Automated R&D in Anthropic’s August 2026 Risk Report
METR reviews Anthropic’s assessment of automated research risks. It agrees the reviewed models posed low direct acute risk, but disputes how the public report described acceleration and early-warning thresholds. METR emphasizes uncertainty and contestable judgments.
Why this: Covers Anthropic and AI research too
Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026
METR assesses whether AI is accelerating research and development at Anthropic. It estimates faster capability progress on well-specified tasks and attributes much of the acceleration to AI use, while stressing uncertainty. Anthropic redacted evidence that would help outsiders independently assess the findings.
Why this: Covers Anthropic and AI research too
The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton's March 2019 essay arguing that the biggest lesson from 70 years of AI research is that general methods leveraging computation ultimately prove most effective, by a large margin. Sutton walks through prominent cases — computer chess, Go, speech recognition, and computer vision — where approaches built on human knowledge were outdone by search and learning methods that scaled with computing power. He attributes the pattern to the steadily falling cost of computation and warns that relying on human knowledge tends to complicate methods in ways that limit scaling.
Why this: Covers compute and AI research too
Fordham AI for Small Business (Coursera)
In plain terms: A free bundle of Coursera AI courses (picked by Fordham) made for small business owners. It covers content creation, social media marketing, data analysis, and an Anthropic AI Fluency course. Self-paced and no cost — a low-risk way to start using AI in your business this week.
Why this: Also about Anthropic