Attention-grabbing headlines predict, in equal parts hype and hysteria, that AI will either be humanity’s salvation or its doom. As with most highly complex technologies, understanding AI requires more nuanced, nonbinary thinking.
That’s not to say there aren’t significant risks. How AI systems are being built today can and likely will affect billions of people now and in the future.
It’s serious business, and it’s why we’re excited that Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, will join us for a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco.
Amodei holds a unique vantage point. He founded Anthropic — one of the best-funded AI companies, with $1.5 billion raised to date — after leaving OpenAI over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus. His focus, and that of his company, is safety first. The goal: prevent large language models (LLM) that train AI systems from going off the rails.
We want to hear more about constitutional AI, a training technique Anthropic developed for its chatbot, Claude 2, which aims to imbue AI systems with a defined set of principles from which LLM won’t stray . . . theoretically. We’re interested in Amodei’s take on why constitutional AI is the way forward.
We’re also curious about Amodei’s plans for commercializing its text-generating AI models, considering that was a factor in his departure from OpenAI. And we’ll likely touch on increasing calls for regulation and the Frontier Model Forum, a voluntary coalition Anthropic recently formed with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google to develop technical evaluations and benchmarks and to promote best practices and standards.
Clearly, there’s a lot of AI ground to cover in this don’t-miss conversation with one of the industry’s leading AI startups.
Dario Amodei: Anthropic co-founder and CEO
Dario Amodei co-founded and leads Anthropic, an AI research startup dedicated to building steerable AI systems that people can rely on, and generating research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant for tasks at any scale, is based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest and harmless AI systems.
Previously, Amodei served as vice president of research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large AI language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3. He is also the co-inventor of reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that powers conversational AI systems like ChatGPT and models created by Anthropic. Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain as a senior research scientist.
Amodei earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
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