A senior academic move from UC Berkeley to Anthropic drew unusually loud online reactions, prompting DeepMind researcher David Pfau to note that his own lab routinely adds comparable talent without similar fanfare or public assembly of the Avengers.
Respect to Jelani and all, hope he enjoys the new gig, but I just don't understand this level of breathless excitement over hiring a senior academic. Google DeepMind hires senior academics all the time and no one acts like it's the Avengers assembling.
Miles Brundage pointed out that DeepMind itself once triggered comparable excitement for academic additions, suggesting the current volume of commentary may reflect shifting norms rather than any single hire's inherent drama.
No details have surfaced yet on Jelani Nelson's exact responsibilities, team placement, or day-to-day focus at Anthropic, leaving open how this move will actually shape research priorities.
Positive users endorse questioning hype over senior academic hires at AI labs like DeepMind, while negative users dismiss the expertise claims and criticize the analogies as inaccurate or disrespectful.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
Hype is all you need 💪
Respect to Jelani and all, hope he enjoys the new gig, but I just don't understand this level of breathless excitement over hiring a senior academic. Google DeepMind hires senior academics all the time and no one acts like it's the Avengers assembling.
@pfau They used to...
Respect to Jelani and all, hope he enjoys the new gig, but I just don't understand this level of breathless excitement over hiring a senior academic. Google DeepMind hires senior academics all the time and no one acts like it's the Avengers assembling.
@pfau Jelani has this video: https://youtu.be/0JUN9aDxVmI?is=RmsjmF_ODhB05AFW
And another video with 10M+ views. He’s quite famous.
@quantzoid Ahhhh ok it's because of YouTube? Must be a generational thing.
@pfau Because people didn't use to tweet about it, thats all
@pfau Karpathy, Jelani, etc are like pop-culture icons in CS. Almost a mythic status for their YouTube videos.
@nomad421 Maybe they're going to use algorithms???
@s14joshi Who?
@s14joshi It's a big place.
@pfau TBH we were pretty breathless when Amin was hired -- cause my roommate (and a few friends) were his students.
@pfau amin vahdat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_Vahdat
@pfau It's because he's not another AI/ML bro. He's an algorithms person. It's just massively different, so what does it mean? Why an algo guy? What are they planning?
@pfau It’s just, you know, Marvel isn’t quite what it used to be after Iron Man died. What else is there to watch?
@pfau I guess not GDM? But this might have been before GDM was a thing?
@pfau @quantzoid surely you can see how a video view >> tweet view and it’s not close
@yxngslimmy @quantzoid My tweets are very information dense
@quantzoid I've had tweets with that many views.
@pfau I think it’s in part because he was EECS department chair and is relatively young. It’s unusual to become department chair and then go on leave in the middle of your term.
@pfau Aside from the YouTube videos…
His expertise is optimizing matrix multiplication/linear algebra. Literally the foundation sitting underneath all of AI (aside from the chips).
Did you bother reading Google Scholar before posting this?
And this is besides looking at his resume.
@MelindaBChu1 @DrellLabs @pfau Bs analogy and disrespect to use @KingJames name like that. Jaleni is not top2 in his field history Google and meta hire tons of these people regularly