🌊 Big Tech’s Doomsday Prophet
Is Dario Amodei a salesman or genuinely worried about where technology is headed?
By Max Frost
In Greek mythology, the god Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. She foresaw the fall of Troy, warned that the Trojan Horse was a trap, and predicted her own enslavement by Agamemnon. She was right about forecasting doom, but no one listened to her.
Several millennia later, Dario Amodei is either a modern-day Cassandra – or a fear-monger and salesman of the first degree. The founder and CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s top AI labs, he’s been sounding the alarm that the very technology he’s building will lead to mass job displacement, disease, and unrest.
Yet despite this, he races ahead: Just this Tuesday, Anthropic announced that it would be abandoning its most stringent AI safety commitments.
So who is Dario Amodei? And what’s his endgame? That’s the subject of today’s deep-dive.
Last month, Amodei released a 20,000-word essay entitled “The Adolescence of Technology.” Few people want to read 20,000 words about anything (one of these articles is typically around 1,200), but when Amodei speaks, people listen.
The 42-year-old, San Francisco-born entrepreneur has a resume that sounds AI-generated: After being a member of the USA Physics olympiad team in high school, he attended Caltech and Stanford before obtaining a PhD in biophysics from Princeton, “where he studied electrophysiology of neural circuits.” He then worked as a cancer researcher at Stanford.
An expert in how the brain processes information and persuaded that computers could vastly improve the research processes he was seeing at Stanford, he made his way to the AI industry in the 2010s, where he worked for China’s Baidu, Google, and OpenAI. He helped them build “neural networks,” like artificial brains that parse information and generate artificial intelligence.
At OpenAI, he became Vice President of Research, playing a key role in its early efforts to build generative AI. His sister, Daniela, worked as OpenAI’s Vice President of Safety and Policy. Together, they called for a greater emphasis on safety. On the other side of that debate was Sam Altman, who put a greater emphasis on rapidly developing advanced technology.