\n Jack Clark, a Brighton-born former Varndean pupil, is now worth an estimated 15.5 billion US dollars, according to Forbes.\n<\/p>\n
\n The 37-year-old is one of the founders of Anthropic, the American artificial intelligence company behind Claude, a chatbot competing with the likes of ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini.\n<\/p>\n
\n His estimated fortune, equivalent to roughly \u00a311.5 billion, would place him comfortably among the wealthiest people associated with Brighton, although the precise value of his privately held stake in Anthropic is not publicly known.\n<\/p>\n
\n Forbes listed Jack Clark as the 195th-richest person in the world on September 10, with a \u2018real-time net worth\u2019 of 15.5 billion US dollars.\n<\/p>\n
\n It describes him as a self-made billionaire whose wealth comes from artificial intelligence.\n<\/p>\n
\n It is a remarkable journey for someone whose route into technology began not with a computer science degree, but through English literature, creative writing and journalism.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jack Clark grew up in Brighton and attended Varndean.\n<\/p>\n
\n He then studied English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 2009.\n<\/p>\n
\n While at university, he worked on the student newspaper Concrete, progressing from reporter to arts editor and then news editor.\n<\/p>\n
\n After graduating, he took a job as a researcher and reporter at communications company Adfero, covering subjects including technology, finance and the environment.\n<\/p>\n
\n He went on to report for ZDNet UK before joining technology publication The Register in 2013.\n<\/p>\n
\n There, he specialised in subjects such as data centres, cloud computing, databases and distributed computer systems.\n<\/p>\n
\n The move proved to be an important step towards the world in which he would eventually make his fortune.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2014, Jack Clark joined Bloomberg as an enterprise technology reporter.\n<\/p>\n
\n He later became its reporter covering Google, artificial intelligence and Amazon Web Services from San Francisco.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n After first reporting on the rapid development of artificial intelligence, he eventually decided to become directly involved in it.\n<\/p>\n
\n He left Bloomberg for OpenAI – developers of ChatGPT – in 2016, initially working in strategy and communications before becoming the organisation\u2019s policy director in 2018.\n<\/p>\n
\n He left OpenAI at the end of 2020 and helped establish Anthropic in 2021 alongside six other former OpenAI researchers.\n<\/p>\n
\n The San Francisco company develops large-scale artificial intelligence systems and is best known for Claude, a family of AI assistants which can generate and analyse text, write computer code and work with documents.\n<\/p>\n
\n Anthropic has attempted to distinguish itself from its competitors through its emphasis on the safety, reliability and wider social consequences of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jack Clark has played a particularly prominent role in explaining those consequences to governments and the public.\n<\/p>\n
\n He has also continued writing about the subject through Import AI, the newsletter he established in 2016 to filter and explain developments in artificial intelligence research and business.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n His path has taken him from a Brighton school and a university newsroom to Bloomberg, OpenAI and eventually the upper ranks of the global technology industry.\n<\/p>\n
\n It has also placed him close to one of the most important and contentious debates of the age: whether humanity can retain control of AI systems as they grow more capable.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Brighton connection resurfaced publicly this year when an interview with Jack Clark on the Rest Is Politics podcast was promoted as the story of how \u2018a Brighton kid ended up shaping the future of intelligence\u2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n His route to Silicon Valley has been strikingly different from the familiar image of the technology billionaire.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jack Clark appearing in June on the Rest Is Politics podcast (Image: Rest Is Politics\/Goalhanger)\n<\/p>\n
\n He did not begin by founding a company from his bedroom or studying computer science at an elite American university.\n<\/p>\n
\n He studied literature, worked for a student newspaper and spent years asking questions of technology executives before becoming one himself.\n<\/p>\n
\n Anthropic is privately held, meaning there is no continuously traded share price with which to calculate the value of Jack Clark\u2019s stake.\n<\/p>\n
\n Forbes\u2019 figure is an estimate linked to the company\u2019s valuation.\n<\/p>\n
\n That could soon change, with Anthropic preparing for an initial public offering in October which could rank among the largest stock market flotations ever attempted.\n<\/p>\n
\n Investors have suggested the listing could value the company at as much as two trillion US dollars.\n<\/p>\n
\n If achieved, the flotation would be among the largest in history and could push Jack Clark\u2019s estimated personal fortune substantially higher.\n<\/p>\n
\n From Brighton schoolboy to journalist, technology policymaker, company founder and multibillionaire, Jack Clark has travelled a long way.\n<\/p>\n
\n And as artificial intelligence continues to transform industries and everyday life, his influence may ultimately prove even greater than his fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Clark, a Brighton-born former Varndean pupil, is now worth an estimated 15.5 billion US dollars, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-768272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}