In December 2020 Dario Amodei left OpenAI, where he had run the research behind GPT-2 and GPT-3, and took his sister and five senior researchers with him to start Anthropic. This episode follows the whole story: the physicist who read textbooks for fun, the father whose illness was cured too late, the scaling laws, the disagreement nobody has fully described, the public benefit corporation and the trust, Claude, constitutional training, the Senate testimony, the Amazon and Google money, the year the programmers switched, and a valuation that passed three hundred billion dollars.
It also covers the jobs warning, the export controls, the authors' settlement, and whether a safety laboratory racing to build the technology is any different from the rest. Founder Stories tells the story of one founder per episode, told plainly and in order.
