The atheist Anthropic cofounder the Pope chose to sit beside him at the Vatican and tell the tech industry it can’t govern itself
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Sitting alongside Pope Leo XIV as he delivered his first encyclical on the dangers of AI was a curious speaker: a self-declared atheist and the billionaire cofounder of one of the most valuable AI companies in the world.
Key facts
A year later, in 2012, he was awarded $100,000 through the Thiel Fellowship, a program created by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel to help talented young people pursue other passions in lieu
Starting in 2015, he spent three years at Google Brain, which in 2023 became part of Google DeepMind
In 2020, Olah was one of the original seven OpenAI employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, to leave the company over concerns about AI safety
Olah later helped cofound Anthropic with this group, which was valued at $965 billion after a recent funding round
Summary
Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s cofounders and a prominent AI safety researcher who serves as the company’s interpretability research lead, acknowledged the peculiarity of his presence during the presentation at the Vatican last week. “I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company,” he said in his prepared remarks. “No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing, and I believe many of us do, we will always be influenced by those incentives,” he said in his prepared remarks.