The Inspiring Journey of Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s Leader

Daniela Amodei, the President and co-founder of Anthropic, is an inspiring figure in the field of artificial intelligence. Her dedication to building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems has led her on a remarkable journey marked by numerous achievements and accolades. 

Before co-founding Anthropic company, she worked as a Risk Manager at Stripe, overseeing сore operations, user policy, and underwriting. She later became the VP of Safety and Policy at Open AI, where she played a pivotal role in ensuring AI technologies’ safety and ethical use. In 2020, she teamed up with a group of like-minded people to create Anthropic, an AI safety and research company that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with artificial intelligence. 

Daniela’s story is one of perseverance, passion, and purpose and serves as a testament to what can be achieved when we dare to dream big and follow our hearts.

The Inspiring Career of Daniela Amodei

Family

Daniela Amodei is known for her close bond with her brother, Dario Amadei. Their bond has also transcended into their professional lives, as they worked together a lot. Dario Amadei is co-founder and CEO of Anthropic company, holds a degree in Physics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in BioPhysics from Princeton, and has a rich background in research and AI. 

According to his LinkedIn profile, Dario has an impressive resume, which includes previous roles as VP of Research at Open AI and Senior Research Scientist at Google. At OpenAI, Dario worked from 2016 to 2020 and oversaw the creation of the company’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models.

They both worked at OpenAi and share a common vision of safety importance. Daniela and Dario share a common perspective that their company’s mission is to create AI systems that are controllable, understandable, and trustworthy. They aim to achieve this by training large generative models and conducting safety research. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that these models are safe and aligned with human values, making them more beneficial to society.

Education

Outstanding achievements and accolades mark Daniela Amodei’s career. First, she completed her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, Politics, and Music at the prestigious University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating with top honors and awards such as Summa Cum Laude, University Honors, College Honors, Literature Department Honors, and Dean’s List. 

Daniela’s passion for music also earned her a partial-tuition scholarship, and her exceptional talent as a soloist helped her win the 2008 Concerto competition. Besides, she was selected as the winner of the Senior Thesis Colloquium, showcasing her excellent academic abilities. These accomplishments testify to Daniela’s dedication and commitment to excellence, resulting in a further remarkable career.

Career path

According to her profile on LinkedIn, Daniela Amodei started her career in 2010. Daniela began to work as a Business Development at the IRIS Center, located at the University of Maryland, College Park. She worked there from January 2010 to August 2011, one year and eight months. In her role, she managed grant processes and recruited key personnel for various international development projects related to poverty assessment, monitoring and evaluation, conflict mitigation, microfinance, and direct cash transfers.

After her tenure at the IRIS Center, she joined Conservation Through Public Health as a fellow from September 2011 to January 2012. While there, she worked with the CEO to develop a strategic grant-making plan and delivered development training to senior staff. She also co-led training for over 50 community health workers at rural field sites in Kampala, Uganda.

She then worked at Matt Cartwright for Congress for ten months as a Deputy Field Director from February 2012 to May 2012. She recruited over 80 volunteers and personally made 11,000 voter calls in key districts. Her efforts contributed to defeating a 20-year incumbent by 12 points in a nationally-covered primary. Then, she became a Field Director from June 2012 to November 2012. Daniela created and executed a field strategy that helped win the general election campaign by 21 points. She led a team of field organizers and volunteers during the campaign.

From January to May 2013, she worked in the Washington D.C. Metro Area for the U.S. House of Representatives, managing all scheduling activities for Congressman Matt Cartwright’s office. She was also responsible for recruiting interns and contributing to articles and press releases. One of her notable contributions was an article published in the U.S. News and World Report.

Demonstrating reliable managerial skills, Daniela decided to join Stripe in 2013, when it was still a young company.

Career at Stripe & Open AI

When she joined Stripe, her career took off like a rocket. Starting as a solo Recruiter, she quickly grew the team from 45 to 300 people, becoming the Lead Technical Recruiter in no time. With a close rate of over 75%, she hired 92 engineers across 11 teams, working closely with the CTO, VP of Engineering, founders, and team leads to develop and execute the company’s technical recruiting strategy.

But she didn’t stop there. As a Risk Program Manager, she analyzed over 7,000 cases of potential fraud, credit, and policy violations with an impressive 90% quality rate and a 97% customer satisfaction rate. Perhaps that was a moment when Daniela realized that safety is essential to her, and later this will result in developing her own product where safety will be a priority.

As a Risk Manager for core operations, user policy, and underwriting, she led three teams of 26 people, achieving a 72% decrease in loss rate from the peak, reaching the lowest rate in company history. She worked cross-functionally with machine learning, data science, engineering, legal, finance, and vendor management to launch Risk’s first vendor program, develop and iterate on fraud, credit, and policy features for models, and partner with machine learning teams to identify and remove thousands of violating users, driving down violation rates by more than 60%. Her leadership and expertise improved the company’s customer satisfaction rating, volume, and policies, setting industry standards and making Stripe a safer and better place for everyone.

After working at Stripe, Daniela joined OpenAI, where she held various positions for two years and three months. Daniela led two technical teams as an Engineering Manager and VP of People. She managed the manager of one technical safety team while working closely with researchers, technical leaders, and engineers. She also took on the VP of People role, overseeing recruitment, people programs, DEI, learning and development, and incubating a new biz ops team, among other responsibilities. Later, as the VP of Safety and Policy, she supervised the technical Safety and Policy functions and managed the Business Operations team.

Building safe AI for a better world

After departing from OpenAI, Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela embarked on a new entrepreneurial journey by founding their own company, Anthropic, in 2021. Inspired by their passion for artificial intelligence and driven by their vision of making it safer for the world, they attracted at least nine other talented people from OpenAI who shared their vision and enthusiasm.

¨It’s a set of people who have known each other for a long time and have been aware of thinking in arguments about AI safety and have worked on them over the years¨, shares Daniela and Dario Amadei in the interview for Future of Life Institute.

What does Anthropic company do?

Have you ever thought about how an AI system generates rhyming couplets? What thought process does it employ to accomplish this task? Which parameters can be adjusted to make the generated output more or less romantic or sad or limit its use of specific diction and lexicon? 

The Amodei siblings are addressing precisely the issue that AI models, despite their immense potential, remain largely opaque and difficult to comprehend. One such model, GPT-3, which they played a pivotal role in developing, is a remarkably adaptable language system that can generate persuasive text on almost any topic and in various styles. Despite this impressive capability, much is still unknown about how GPT-3 functions and how it arrives at its outputs. As a result, the Amodei siblings decided to work on enhancing our understanding of these AI systems.

“Anthropic’s goal is to make the fundamental research advances that will let us build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems, then deploy these systems in a way that benefits people,” said Dario Amodei.

Anthropic´s fundraising journey

In 2021, Anthropic received a substantial investment of $124 million, and the list of investors is quite impressive. The team is headed by Jaan Tallinn, one of the co-founders of Skype, and includes prominent figures such as James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, among others.

Later, PitchBook, a platform that monitors private investment data, reports that the company raised $704 million, leading to a valuation of $4 billion.

According to the latest news, Anthropic plans to raise up to $5 billion within the next two years as it strives to compete with established rival OpenAI and break into more than a dozen significant industries. In March 2023, the Information disclosed that Anthropic was attempting to secure $300 million at a $4.1 billion valuation, with total funding of $1.3 billion.

Bottom line

Daniela Amodei’s journey inspires anyone looking to make an impact in the world of technology. Her dedication to her work and passion for AI research led her to become a co-founder of Anthropic AI, where she leads the charge to develop safe and trustworthy AI models. Her concern for the safety of these systems is a reminder that, as AI technology advances, it is essential to keep ethics at the forefront of development. With her skills and experience, Amodei is paving the way for the future of AI, and her journey serves as a testament to the power of dedication and hard work in achieving one’s goals.