Joseph: LLM training requires collaborative infrastructure work over publishable research papers
Nick Joseph · Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator · Sep 30, 2025 · at 14:14
Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-Training at Anthropic, contrasts academic AI research cultures like FAIR with the engineering demands of frontier LLM development.
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“And to do a project like training a large language model requires a lot of people to collaborate on like a really complicated piece of infrastructure that isn't going to be a paper, right? Like you're not going to publish like, oh, I got a slightly, I got five percent more efficiency than the next one and it's not respected in like those cultures necessarily, so that might have been part of it.”
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