Anthropic hired Jelani Nelson, a UC Berkeley computer science professor and former chair of its electrical engineering and computer science department, taking leave from academia to join the company’s pretraining team this week, according to SFGATE. Nelson’s team builds the core knowledge and capabilities behind Claude, and he announced the move on X, saying he was excited to work on the defining technology of our time. Nelson earned his computer science doctorate from MIT in 2011, taught at Harvard starting in 2013, where a lecture on advanced algorithms drew more than 21M views on YouTube, and joined Berkeley in 2019 before being elevated to department chair last year. He also became a vocal critic of California’s 2023 math curriculum reforms, signing a 1,700-academic open letter that warned the changes would disadvantage public-school students against private and international peers.
