Tom Brown (@nottombrown) co-founded Anthropic after helping build GPT-3 at OpenAI. A self-taught engineer, he went from getting a B-minus in linear algebra to becoming one of the key people behind AI's scaling breakthroughs. Today, Anthropic's Claude is the go-to choice for developers, and his team is overseeing what he calls "humanity's largest infrastructure buildout ever." On the @LightconePod, he discusses his unconventional path from YC founder to AI researcher, the discovery of scaling laws that changed everything, and his advice for young engineers entering AI today. 0:00 - From Failure to Success 2:30 - Early Startup Days at Linked Language 4:12 - The Grouper Dating Experiment 6:10 - Making the Leap to OpenAI 8:42 - First Product Launch Challenges 10:12 - Self-Teaching AI Research 12:44 - Building GPT-3 Infrastructure 15:44 - The Anthropic Spinoff 18:23 - Early Days of Building Claude 20:21 - The ChatGPT Wake-Up Call 22:08 - Claude 3.5 Sonnet Breakthrough 24:13 - Why Benchmarks Don't Tell the Whole Story 26:20 - Claude Code's Secret Sauce 28:51 - Building for the AI Agent 31:11 - The Largest Infrastructure Buildout Ever 32:46 - Multi-Chip Strategy 34:38 - Advice for the Next Generation