Nelson Elhage – Personal Homepage

web

Personal homepage of Nelson Elhage, an engineer and researcher at Anthropic who has worked on mechanistic interpretability and reverse-engineering large language models, making this a useful reference for tracking his research contributions to AI safety.

Metadata

Importance: 35/100homepage

Summary

This is the personal homepage of Nelson Elhage, a researcher at Anthropic currently on the pretraining team, previously focused on reverse-engineering and interpretability of large language models. The page links to his blog, newsletter, and various software projects. His work at Anthropic on mechanistic interpretability is directly relevant to AI safety research.

Key Points

•Currently an engineer/researcher at Anthropic, working on pretraining; previously worked on reverse-engineering/interpretability of LLMs.
•Links to Anthropic's interpretability research team output, relevant to mechanistic interpretability in AI safety.
•Previously at Stripe (founding member of Sorbet static typechecker) and Ksplice (live Linux kernel patching).
•Maintains several technical blogs including one on debugging and one tracking accidental O(n²) complexity in real-world code.
•Has a background in systems security, including KVM/Linux kernel security research presented at Black Hat 2011.

Cached Content Preview

HTTP 200Fetched Apr 9, 20263 KB

Nelson Elhage 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 Nelson Elhage

 

 
 
 Nelson Elhage 
 
 email 

 blog 

 mastodon 

 
 

 Work

 
 I'm currently an engineer and researcher at Anthropic . I currently work on
 our pretraining team; before that I worked on
 reverse-engineering large language models. You can read that team's
 research .
 

 Previously, I've worked at:

 
 
 Stripe , where I worked on a
 variety of projects and teams, including as a founding member
 of the Sorbet project.
 

 
 Ksplice (and,
 post-acquisition, Oracle) working on the Ksplice technology
 and product for updating the Linux kernel without rebooting.
 

 

 livegrep 

 
 As a personal project, I've put together livegrep.com , a site which
 allows for realtime regex searching of the Linux kernel
 as-you-type, using Russ Cox's RE2 regex library, and
 a custom indexing backend.
 

 
 It's open-source and
 you can deploy it for your own source code! It's also one of the
 backends for Mozilla's SearchFox .
 

 Writing

 
 I write at a number of online venues. You can find stuff I've
 written at:
 

 
 blog.nelhage.com , my
 personal blog 

 A
 newsletter , which gets more experimental or in-progress
 thought.

 nelhagedebugsshit.tumblr.com ,
 where I chronicle interesting shorter stories of things I've
 debugged or investigated.

 accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com ,
 where I chronicle real-world cases of code with unintended
 Θ(n²) complexity with harmful consequences.
 

 

 Code

 
 Sorbet , Stripe's
 open-source static Ruby typechecker. I was a founding member of
 the project at Stripe, helping to build it out and deploy it
 internally.
 

 Llama , an
 experiment in using Amazon's Lambda service for distributed
 compilation. I've written about using
 it to compile LLVM in 90s , as well as the
 broader vision of the project. 
 

 Taktician , an AI
 for the game of Tak ,
 based on the game described in Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise
 Man's Fear . For several years it was the highest-ranked
 entity on the playtak.com 
 online site.
 

 crossme.app , a
 collaborative online crossword-puzzle solver.

 reptyr , a
 little tool I wrote for moving a running program to a new terminal. You
 can read 
 more on
 my blog .
 

 My emacs
 configuration files . I keep my entire emacs
 configuration in a single git repository so I can just check it
 out on new machines. Feel free to borrow any pieces of it you
 want.

 I wrote a JIT
 translator for the Beta, the simple processor used in MIT's
 6.004 computer science
 class. It's a fairly clean, simple, working JIT in about 2000
 lines of C that might be interesting to someone.

 Check out my github
 account for more things I've done.

 

 Security

 I've previously done some security work for various open-source
 projects, including the Linux kernel and KVM. I presented at Black
 Hat USA 2011 about some work I have done on KVM. My slides 
 and code for
 that talk are now available online.

Resource ID: 28d80f8eda4be461 | Stable ID: sid_ryhy94WK8w