Clive Chan, who says he was the second hardware employee in OpenAI's custom chip program, is moving to Anthropic. The departure comes as both companies prepare for IPOs and Anthropic is reportedly considering building its own chips.
In a public post, Chan wrote that he's proud to have been part of the program. The "density of hardware talent" on the team was extraordinary. "I don't think there's a better chip design team anywhere," he said, expecting that the chips developed there would become "one of the most important engines of AGI."
Despite those apparently stellar conditions, he's now joining Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, which, like Chan's former employer, is on the verge of going public. At OpenAI, Chan worked on building custom chips from scratch and was involved in the strategic partnership between OpenAI and Broadcom, although that partnership reportedly hit snags over production costs and OpenAI's creditworthiness.
Whether Anthropic hired Chan to design custom chips or to optimize software for existing hardware isn't clear. His LinkedIn role description, "perplexity per picojoule," could mean either. Perplexity is a common metric for how well language models predict text, and a picojoule is a tiny unit of energy.
