Show notes
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company behind the Claude chatbot, is slated to go public imminently and promises be the biggest initial public offering ever. The man behind the company is this week’s profilee, Dario Amodei.
As a child in San Francisco, he was fascinated by maths and science, and used to play games with his younger sister Daniela, where they would pretend to save the world. That was prescient, because in 2021, the pair founded Anthropic along with five other co-founders.
Dario studied at California Institute of Technology followed by Stanford followed by a PHD in biophysics at Princeton University, where he specialised in the retina, before making a sharp turn into machine learning. He worked at Baidu (China’s version of Google) and Google Brain, then later joined OpenAI. His eventual falling out with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over ethical issues has become legend.
Since then he’s been known as one of the voices in Silicon Valley calling out the potential catastrophic harms of AI, despite developing his own models at breakneck speed. So who is Dario Amodei and how did he end up at the helm of one of the richest companies in human history? Becky Milligan finds out.
Production:
Presenter: Becky Milligan
Producers: Ben Crighton, Eleanor Harrison-Dengate
Sound mix: Gareth Jones
Production Co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Editor: Justine Lang
Archive:
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Website: bbc.co.uk
