Ben Bartlett

I am a San Francisco-based physicist currently working as a researcher at OpenAI on massive distributed computing problems. I have a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University, where I designed programmable photonic computers for quantum information processing and ultra high-speed machine learning. If you’re interested, here is my resume/CV.

Outside of research, I am also an artist working primarily with LEDs and kinetic sculptures. I’m best known for Event Horizon: a colossal three-story tall motorized gyroscope with over a mile of LEDs, built at Burning Man 2025. I’ve also made a number of smaller art pieces and a have another large one in the works. My pieces use a custom software stack I wrote and all incorporate synchronized light and motion.

When I’m not making GPU clusters go brr or building huge LED sculptures, you can probably find me playing piano, blogging about technical stuff, making math animations, working on random coding projects, or just vibing with my cat.