Jared Kaplan, PhD

Jared Kaplan is the co-founder of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Jared’s research developed models that explain the presence of dark matter that will be tested at the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a general effective field theory that explicates the universe’s earliest history and the origin of structure. Jared has recently published a series of papers working towards a holographic description of flat-space physics—this would be an intrinsically two-dimensional description of our apparently three-dimensional world. After graduation, Jared moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as a postdoctoral fellow where he is continuing research on scattering amplitudes and preparing for the first data from the Large Hadron Collider.

As a student of Professor Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study, Jared primarily studied questions in high-energy physics and cosmology that will be accessible to upcoming experiments, most notably, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will turn on in the fall of 2008. As an example question, which the LHC will almost certainly answer—we know that the sun contains roughly 10^60 atoms, and that this gigantic number is a result of the extreme weakness of gravity relative to the other forces—so why is gravity so weak? Jared has also worked on seemingly more abstract problems, such as the quantum mechanical interpretation of the very early universe, when such problems directly connect to experimental results.

Jared graduated with distinction and honors from Stanford University with a double major in physics and mathematics.

In his free time, Jared practices martial arts and writes.