initial public offering<\/a>. <\/p>\nAmodei\u2019s decision to leave OpenAI, and the work he has done since, is underpinned by two convictions, according to multiple people who know him. One, that he is more capable of building all-powerful AI than his former boss; and two, that the world would be safer if he does.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has a strong view on where he\u2019s going. Dario understands you have to have a good business to pursue the mission,\u201d says Matt Murphy, a partner at Silicon Valley investment firm Menlo Ventures, which led a funding round for Anthropic last year.<\/p>\n
Investors in the company describe Amodei as someone whose evangelism for \u201csafe AI\u201d is wedded to keen commercial instincts. \u201cFounders are either technical, good at product or sales. Dario is one of the few CEOs I\u2019ve met in my life who does all three,\u201d says Divesh Makan, founder of Iconiq Capital, which led Anthropic\u2019s last funding round. <\/p>\n
Amodei was born and raised in San Francisco by a mother who renovated libraries and a leathersmith father. The 42-year-old studied physics at Stanford and gained a PhD in biophysics before embarking on a career as an AI researcher. He joined Chinese internet giant Baidu in 2014 before a brief stint at Google Brain. <\/p>\n
In 2016, he was among the earliest employees of OpenAI, founded by Altman, Elon Musk and nine others as a place to pursue AI research without the commercial pressures of a corporate tech parent. Amodei was instrumental in developing the large language models behind chatbot ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
But after five years, Amodei left following disagreements with Altman over OpenAI\u2019s direction and with concerns about AI\u2019s potential for harm if appropriate guardrails were not put in place. In 2021, he co-founded Anthropic with his sister.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat he thought was important was developing a company where these things could be deployed safely and transparently in the world,\u201d says Ravi Mhatre, co-founder of VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which invested over $1bn in Anthropic this year. \u201cHe felt he needed a clean slate.\u201d<\/p>\n
But this focus on safe AI development has earned him criticism in both Washington and Silicon Valley. David Sacks, Trump\u2019s AI tsar, claimed in October that Anthropic was running a \u201csophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering\u201d. Investor Marc Andreessen argues that extra AI regulation will impede US start-ups. <\/p>\n
Critics cast Amodei as a \u201cdoomer\u201d influenced by the effective altruism movement, which believes AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The Amodei siblings deny they are effective altruists or doomers. But the company\u2019s early funding came from investors with ties to the movement, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was later convicted of fraud. <\/p>\n
There are also concerns from some in the AI sector that Anthropic\u2019s rapid growth is now testing Amodei\u2019s ability to balance the pursuit of \u201csafe\u201d AI with the needs of his shareholders.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the early stage of Anthropic, they very much said \u2018we don\u2019t want to fuel the AI race, we want to be just behind the frontier and do AI safety research.\u2019 That\u2019s clearly not the case now. Some people in the AI safety community are pretty unhappy with that,\u201d said a person who works in AI safety.<\/p>\n
Anthropic has received the backing of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, and earlier this year changed its stance on accepting funding from the Middle East. \u201cUnfortunately, I think \u2018no bad person should ever benefit from our success\u2019 is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,\u201d Amodei told staff.<\/p>\n
To articulate his strategic shifts and view of the world, Amodei likes to write lengthy public essays (the last one exceeded 13,000 words). During a five-hour podcast interview last year, he also took a brief diversion from discussing programming languages to hold forth on the meaning of life.<\/p>\n
His earnest messages have been well received by the public. And his ebullience about his company\u2019s mission is popular among employees, helping Anthropic retain top researchers in a competitive market. \u201cHe has cult leader status,\u201d says the person in AI safety.<\/p>\n
The company is now in the earliest stages of preparing for a public listing. There is strong demand from investors to own a slice of what Amodei has built.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t imagine the company without Dario. He is the person who spearheads the key technical challenges and motivates everyone,\u201d says Lightspeed\u2019s Mhatre. \u201cWhat\u2019s Apple without Steve Jobs or Microsoft without Bill Gates?\u201d<\/p>\n
george.hammond@ft.com<\/a><\/p>\nAdditional reporting by Cristina Criddle and Tabby Kinder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-333557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}