CO-FOUNDERS | ANTHROPIC
A S SIBLINGS GO, DARIO and Daniela Amodei agree more than most. “Since we were kids, we’ve always felt very aligned,” Daniela says.
Alignment is top of mind for the brother-and-sister duo at the helm of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI labs. In industry lingo, the term means ensuring AI systems are “aligned” with human values. Dario, 40, and Daniela, 36—CEO and president, respectively—believe they are taking a safer and more responsible approach to AI alignment than other companies building cutting-edge AI systems.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic has carried out pioneering “mechanistic interpretability” research that aims to allow developers to perform something analogous to a brain scan—to see what’s really going on inside an AI system, rather than relying on text outputs that don’t give a true representation of its inner workings. Anthropic has also developed Constitutional AI, a radical new method for aligning AI systems. It has embedded those approaches into its chatbot, Claude 2, a close competitor to GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful model.
Anthropic has seven founders, all of whom previously worked at OpenAI before leaving to start their own company. Dario and Daniela are diplomatic about what pushed them to leave, but suggest they had a different vision for AI safety. “I think our existence in the ecosystem hopefully causes other organizations to become more like us,” Dario says. “That’s ... part of our theory of change.”
Accordingly, Anthropic casts -itelf as an AI-safety-research lab. To do that research, however, the Amodei siblings have calculated they need to build their own state-of-the-art AI models. For that, they need vast amounts of computing power, which in turn means they need a lot of money. And that means rather than acting as a nonprofit, they need to operate as a business that sells access to its AI models to other businesses and raises funds from investors. Anthropic has raised $1.6 billion, including $500 million from the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange. (Investors
