(1991) transcript: Richard Crandall presents the Vollum Award to Steve Jobs on behalf of Reed College

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:52:42 -0400

This is a link-post to an audio recording of Steve Jobs receiving the Vollum Award at his alma mater Reed College. The award, for “distinguished accomplishment in science and technology”, is presented annually at the convocation ceremony that kicks off Reed’s autumn semester. It is not restricted to Reed alumni; Bill Gates, for example, received it in 1984.

This recording starts with an introduction by the late Reed professor Richard Crandall, and ends after Jobs’ acceptance speech. Crandall’s speech is brilliant – full of endearingly arcane idiosyncrasies – and contains at least one killer quotation.

Vitae

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After 11 consecutive years pushing the frontier from inside the big AI labs, I am spending some time working as an independent researcher in New York City.

independentThinking Machines LabOpenAIDeepMindUCLReed College

Mar. 2025 – Jul. 2026

I was part of the founding team at Thinking Machines Lab. I worked on high-compute RL science, as well as long-term research that is difficult to categorize.

Sep. 2022 – Feb. 2025

At OpenAI, I landed contributions to most parts of the frontier deep learning stack:

Jacob Menick

(1991) transcript: Richard Crandall presents the Vollum Award to Steve Jobs on behalf of Reed College

Vitae

Mar. 2025 – Jul. 2026

Sep. 2022 – Feb. 2025