Early Life and Education
Daniela Amodei was born in the late 1980s in San Francisco, California to Elena, a Jewish American from Chicago who worked as a library project manager; and Riccardo, an Italian who worked as a leather craftsman. Her older brother is Dario. As a teenager, Amodei attended Lowell High School. She subsequently went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.
Career Beginnings
Amodei began her career in global health and politics. After working for a congressional campaign in Pennsylvania, she briefly managed communications in Washington, DC for Democratic Pennsylvania U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright. Amodei then left politics and became involved in financial technology, joining the financial services and software-as-a-service company Stripe in 2013. In 2018, she entered the world of artificial intelligence when she joined the AI organization OpenAI as its vice president of safety and policy.
Anthropic
Anthropic works to research the safety and reliability of AI systems, as well as the interpretability of machine learning systems. In addition to its research, the company developed the Claude family of large language models, with the first model being released in 2023. Falling under the category of generative pre-trained transformers, Claude models are pre-trained to predict the next word in large quantities of text. Using reinforcement learning from human feedback, as well as a proprietary framework called Constitutional AI, Claude is designed to be both helpful and harmless. While Claude has been praised for its safety features and alignment-focused architecture, it has also faced the same criticisms that apply to all large language models. Chief among them is the concern that these systems ingest vast quantities of copyrighted and proprietary content scraped from the internet, including books, articles, essays, and other original work, without consent or compensation to the creators. Critics argue that tools like Claude repurpose this content into plausible-sounding responses that compete with, and often obscure, the original sources, effectively cutting off the economic value for the people who created the underlying work.
Personal Life
In the summer of 2017, Amodei married nonprofit entrepreneur and businessman Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell and the grant-making organization Open Philanthropy.
