Sam McCandlish
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Architect; co-led the 2020 scaling-laws research at OpenAI
Sam McCandlish co-founded Anthropic and is its Chief Architect; McCandlish focuses on large-scale model training and leads pretraining, research productivity and RL infrastructure. According to Anthropic's leadership page, McCandlish previously built and led a team at OpenAI focused on the science and scaling of machine learning. McCandlish is first author of "An Empirical Model of Large-Batch Training" (2018), written with an OpenAI affiliation, and an equal-contribution author of "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" (2020), whose contribution statement says Jared Kaplan and McCandlish led the research.123
Work
Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Equal-contribution author of the 2020 paper on power-law scaling of language-model loss; its contribution statement says Jared Kaplan and McCandlish led the research.3
An Empirical Model of Large-Batch Training (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author of the 2018 paper, written with an OpenAI affiliation, on predicting the largest useful batch size for training across domains.2
HumanEvalOpen data
Co-author of the 2021 Codex paper that introduced HumanEval; the paper lists McCandlish with Anthropic AI and notes the work was performed while at OpenAI.45
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
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