Ben Bartlett

stanford_pic.jpg

I am a researcher at OpenAI working on a project which could accelerate AI training on huge GPU clusters. Before my recent switch into AI, I was a physicist working as a quantum computer architect at PsiQuantum, designing a scalable and fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer.

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. Most of my research sits at the intersection of nanophotonics, supercomputing, quantum physics, and machine learning, and basically consists of me designing little race tracks for photons that trick them into doing useful computations.

During my PhD I was an AI resident at Google X, working on an undisclosed project involving electromagnetics, machine learning, and distributed computing. Prior to that, I earned an MS in electrical engineering from Stanford and a BS in physics and computer science from Caltech. If you’re interested, here is my resume/CV.

When I’m not trying to trick photons into thinking or making GPU clusters go brr, you can probably find me playing piano, making math animations, doing LED art projects, writing shader art, blogging about technical stuff, working on random coding projects, or just vibing with my cat.

Selected publications

  1. backprop_toggle_fast_small.webp
    Experimentally realized in-situ backpropagation for deep learning in photonic neural networks
    Sunil Pai, Zhanghao Sun, Tyler W Hughes, Taewon Park, Ben Bartlett, and 6 more authors
    Science, 2023
  2. qc_single_atom.webp
    Deterministic photonic quantum computation in a synthetic time dimension
    Ben Bartlett, Avik Dutt, and Shanhui Fan
    Optica, 2021
  3. qpga_animation.webp
    Universal programmable photonic architecture for quantum information processing
    Ben Bartlett, and Shanhui Fan
    Physical Review A, 2020
  4. eo_activation.png
    Reprogrammable Electro-Optic Nonlinear Activation Functions for Optical Neural Networks
    Ian A. D. Williamson, Tyler W. Hughes, Momchil Minkov, Ben Bartlett, Sunil Pai, and 1 more author
    IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 2019
  5. matrixopt.png
    Matrix optimization on universal unitary photonic devices
    Sunil Pai, Ben Bartlett, Olav Solgaard, and David AB Miller
    Physical Review Applied, 2019

Latest blog posts