Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei is the cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Before founding Anthropic, Amodei was vice president of research at OpenAI and a senior research scientist at Google.

Amodei completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University, graduating in 2006 with a BS in Physics. Between 2006 and 2011, he completed a PhD in physics and biophysics at Princeton University. Working with Prof. Micheal Berry and Prof. Wiliam Bialek, Amodei's Thesis was titled "Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits."

After completing his PhD, Amodei became a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine, working on applications of mass spectrometry to analyze network models of the cellular proteome and search for cancer biomarkers. After working part-time as a software developer for Skyline Targeted Proteomics Environment and a year as a research scientist at Baidu, Amodei joined Google in 2015. He worked on the Google Brain team, extending the capabilities of neural networks.

After ten months at Google, Amodei began working for OpenAI, initially as team lead for AI safety. He went on to become research director and vice president of research before leaving in December 2020 to work on his own company, Anthropic. While at OpenAI, Amodei led the efforts to build GPT-2 and GPT-3 and also led several teams focused on long-term safety research. This included research to make AI systems more interpretable and embedding human preferences and values in future powerful AI systems. Dario's sister, Daniela Amodei joined OpenAI in October 2018 as engineering manager & VP of people, going on to become the company's VP of safety and policy.

In January 2021, Amodei founded the AI safety and research company Anthropic, along with six other employees of OpenAI, including his sister Daniela. Amodei became CEO of the new company. Anthropic registered in California on February 3, 2021, during the early stages of the company, and a number of other OpenAI employees joined Anthropic. In a podcast from 2022, Dario Amodei explained the motivation behind starting the new company:

We were all working at OpenAI and trying to make this focused bet on basically scaling plus safety or safety with a lens towards scaling being a big part of the path to AGI. And when we felt we were making this focused bet within a larger organization and it just eventually came to the conclusion that it would be great to have an organization like top to bottom was just focused on this bet and could make all its strategic decisions with this bet in mind. And so that was the thinking and the genesis.

Since its founding, Anthropic has raised significant funding, including a $450M Series C round in May 2023 at a $4.1 billion valuation. This brought the company's total funding to over $1B. In September 2023, the company announced a partnership with Amazon, including up to $4B in investment. The agreement includes Amazon Web Services (AWS) becoming Anthropic's Anthropic’s primary cloud provider with the company getting access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, for model training and deployment.

Anthropic's research aims to allow developers to better understand what is going on inside an AI system, rather than relying on outputs alone, treating models as a black box. The company has developed a new method they call "constitutional AI" for aligning AI systems. This approach is embedded in its chatbot Claude 2, a competitor to GPT-4.