Daniela Amodei: The Girl Behind Claude 3

Key Takeaways

this is the girl open AI fears the most her name is Daniela amod and she's the president of anthropic one of the fastest growing startups in the world by releasing an AI chatbot comparable to gbd4 danela and her team are going directly against open AI Google and Microsoft Time Magazine chose her and her brother as the most influential leaders in AI even above people like Sam ultman deis hbis and Elon Musk danela was a genius from a young age she grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC in school danela studied English literature and politics she graduated with top owners and got on the Deans List in other words she is smart AF danela started her career in 2010 first working at the Irish center before joining a nonprofit focused on helping gorillas and other Wildlife she personally traveled to Uganda where she trained local health workers in 2013 she worked in the US House of Representatives directly under a Congressman even though she enjoyed working in the public sector Daniela knew something had to change you know I I really support people that are kind of working in those areas and I think they matter you know so much and I just felt like I personally kind of wasn't having the level of impact that I was that I was kind of looking for that's when she decided to join a small startup named stripe now of course today stripe has over 4,000 employees but that wasn't the case when danela joined here but I started at this this Tech startup called stripe it was about 40 people when I Jo that's when her career took off like a rocket danela was a solo recruiter and she quickly grew the team from 40 to 300 people which got her a promotion to lead recruiter she achieved a close rate of over 75% because of her excellent performance she closely worked with the founders as well as the CTO and at that time the CTO of stripe was a man by the name of Greg Brockman more on him later daniela's interest in AI began while she was at strike when she had the position of a risk manager she often partnered with machine learning teams to reduce violation rates in fact she believed in the future of AI so much that in 2018 she decided to leave stripe and join open AI after stripe I went to open Ai and I was there for about two uh two plus years if you're new to the channel my name is David Andre and I make AI videos like this one so if you want to see more please subscribe leaving stripe wasn't easy Daniela spent over 5 years working there and she saw the company go from a 40 person startup to a multi-billion dollar company however joining open AI made sense because one of the co-founders was an old colleague of hers that's right Greg Brockman left his position as the CTO of stripe to become the CTO of open AI but danela had another reason to join this AI startup and this reason was even stronger and more convincing it was her brother Dario amod is 4 years older than Dan and he was one of the first people to join open AI you know Dario and I have always been really close I think since we were very very small we've always kind of had this kind of special bond around really wanting to you know make the world better with a PhD in physics and an impressive resume Dario worked as the head of AI safety before becoming the research director of open AI he was in charge of the team responsible for building gpt2 and gpt3 while Dario was a worldclass researcher Daniela was great at leading and managing people this skill set allowed her to quickly climb the ranks starting as an engineer manager and VP of people and later becoming the VP of safety and policy basically she was the one making sure that AI doesn't go Rogue and take over the world we had worked on things like you know gpt2 and gpt3 the release of gpd2 was huge for open AI it cemented its place as one of the leading in AI research lives and in those days I'm like oh my God this is like some kind of General reasoning and prediction engine like oh my God what is this thing I have in my hands right it's it's completely crazy so when gpt3 was released the expectations were really high luckily gpt3 was amazing and the feedback from the AI Community was overwhelmingly positive however not everyone was happy Daniela and Dario were becoming increasingly concerned with the direction in which open AI was heading the company was more and more involved with Microsoft which meant open AI began focusing more on products and revenue and less on safety and Alignment the amod siblings didn't like this shift towards commercialization after talking to some of their co-workers they realized that something had to be done and so in December of 2020 Dario danela and five others left open AI this was a huge hit for the company Not only was open AI suddenly without a research director a big problem for an AI research lab but Dario and Daniela leing created a ripple effect over a dozen other people including some of the most important AI Engineers also chose to reside it's safe to say that Sam ultman wasn't happy when he found out but he had no idea of what was to come the amod day siblings didn't just leave they went and created their own AI company choosing to directly compete against open AI there were seven co-founders ERS who left um and then I I think in total we got 14 or 15 people from open AI which was about 10% of the the size of the organization at the time they named this new startup anthropic which comes from the Greek word anthropos which means man or human man the amount of time I mistyped anthropic is unlike any other company name anyways the team at anthropic was absolutely Elite because our founding team are like mostly phds like we we have like seven physics phds and like our first 10 employees or something like that you know you aren't messing around when 70% of your team are phds okay so what was the vision behind anthropic part of anthropic because we really wanted the opportunity to take this kind of focused research bet that safety could be at the frontier what we're aiming to do is not just to be successful as a company on our own although we are trying to do that um but that were also trying to kind of set a standard for the field set the pace to put it simply Dario and Daniela wanted to build in safety from the very beginning making it the core principle of the company not just one of the side projects however in the early days there was a lot of work to be done before anthropic could call itself a leading AI research lab let alone competing with open Ai danela and the founders realized that if they wanted to build Cutting Edge language models they would need to raise a a lot of money because supercomputers aren't cheap in 2021 they predicted that anthropic would need to raise as much as $5 billion over the next 2 years alone little did they know that this prediction would be almost prophetic this was also the first time that Daniela was the president of a company let alone a co-founder I think being a co-founder is it's a different experience in the sense that like you just you go through different phases right I mean is it's by far the least fun and glamorous did we pay everyone this month and we're sort of like we're sorry if we didn't pay you could you email Jared luckily this early chaotic startup phase didn't last that long in May of 2021 anthropic secured their first round of investment totaling over $124 million the list of investors includes names like John talene the creator of Skype Dustin moskovitz one of the Facebook co-founders and Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 very solid list for a 6month old startup danela and Dario decided they wanted to start by focusing on the research first making sure their AI models were helpful honest and harmless before building products with them on one hand it's admirable that they want to prioritize safety and interpretability but on the other it sounds weird given that all the money they are currently making is because of the AI research and the products they offer not because of safety what most people don't realize is that anthropic business model is mainly focused on Enterprise clients that means medium and large companies and it's unbelievably impressive how quickly Dario and Daniela are scaling the company anthropic was started over 5 years later than open AI yet they are quickly catching up in September Amazon announced that it would invest up to $4 billion into anthropic taking a minority stake in the company earlier this year open ai's valuation was 29 billion and now anthropic has reached a whopping 20 to 30 billion valuation given that they are 2 and A2 years old this has to be some speedrun record but even though Claud 2 anthropic latest AI model is almost as good as gbd4 I feel like a lot of people are still underestimating this company just look at the weight list for the claw 2 API over free 50,000 people waiting to get access and of course I'm one of them right now anthropic has just 160 employees which is absolutely insane considering their $3 billion valuation if you do the math that's almost $200 million per employee that's what happens when you only hire worldclass people it's nothing short of mind-blowing what Daniela amod has been able to accomplish over the last 10 years she went from doing nonprofit work in West Africa to being one of the most important leaders in the AI Revolution if you want me to cover a specific person in the AI field then follow me on X and send me a message it's the first link in the description