Laurens van der Maaten

Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic

New York, New York, United States

About

I am an AI researcher and org leader with 18+ years of experience. I invented t-SNE with Geoffrey Hinton. I pioneered the web-scale training of image recognition systems for Facebook and Instagram. I co-developed DenseNets and was the lead developer for CrypTen. My research has won Best Paper Awards at CVPR and UAI. As an org leader, I led the teams that developed the Cicero Diplomacy bot and the ESM-2/Fold algorithms. I was technical co-lead for Llama 3. I am currently at Anthropic helping to build Claude.

Experience

  • Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
    Aug 2025 - Present · 1 yr

  • Angel Investor at EvolutionaryScale
    Sep 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 11 mos

  • Angel Investor at Kera Health Platforms Inc.
    Jul 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 1 mo

  • Meta (10 yrs 4 mos)
    • Senior Research Director
      Feb 2023 - Jun 2025 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    • Research Director
      Jan 2020 - Feb 2023 · 3 yrs 2 mos

    • Research Scientist
      Mar 2015 - Jan 2020 · 4 yrs 11 mos

  • TU Delft (5 yrs 7 mos)
    • Assistant Professor
      Apr 2013 - Feb 2015 · 1 yr 11 mos

      Research and teaching in machine learning, pattern recognition, and computer vision.

    • Post-doctoral researcher
      Aug 2009 - Mar 2013 · 3 yrs 8 mos

      Working on various machine learning and computer vision problems.