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If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born
The brother goes on vision quests. The sister is a former English major. Together, they defected from OpenAI, started Anthropic, and built (they say) AI’s most upstanding citizen, Claude.
Months later, OpenAI organized as a nonprofit company with the stated goal of advancing AI such that it is “most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” Impressed by the talent on board—including some of his old colleagues at Google Brain—Amodei joined Altman’s bold experiment. “My first thought,” he says, “was, oh my God, could systems that are smarter than humans figure out how to destabilize the nuclear deterrent?” Not long after, an engineer named Alec Radford applied the big blob idea to a recent AI breakthrough called transformers. The lead investor in Anthropic’s seed round was EA supporter Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian engineer who made billions off helping found Skype and Kazaa and has funneled money and energy into a series of AI safety organizations.
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