Dario and Daniela Amodei are finally ready to return to Italy. The Italian-American brothers from Silicon Valley, where three years ago they founded the startup Anthropic together with Jack Clark, are bringing Claude 3, the latest version of their generative artificial intelligence platform, to Europe. A Large Language Model so to speak, an English formula that has become famous since ChatGPT made its debut AI within everyone’s reach. The Amodei brothers, in a market that is only just beginning but which already appears well congested – yesterday Open AI launched the free GPT-4o model, this evening it will be Google’s turn to respond with the news on Gemini -, want to bring a different approach to intelligence artificial: Helpfull, Honest, Harmless. Helpful, honest, inoffensive: «Our main work is on product safety, the transparency of the results: it is a business model that tries to make ethics and competitiveness work together. And it works very well”, explain Dario and Daniela Amodei to Corriere della Sera. A philosophy that led both of them to leave OpenAi in 2020 to found Anthropic, and which would have moved the board of the GPT company to recall Dario Amodei to replace Sam Altman. But the approach to new technology of the two young gurus it seems the opposite. And Dario refused.
The availability of the Claude platform (Claude.ai) brings a new competitor to the European market, more attentive to services for companies, «but we have the desire to try to enter into people’s daily habits too», as confirmed by the launch of the iPhone app (Android is on the way). The models to choose from, with different price orders — in addition to free daily tokens — are named according to size, Haiku, Sonnet and Opus. And this version of Claude — «the most extensive and powerful platform of Large Language Model currently available” — is already the most widely used worldwide. If Anthropic is (still) little known here, the market has not stopped at the low profile chosen by the company. From Google to Amazon, there are many big tech companies ringing the Amodei brothers’ doorbell. «If we talk about something as new and powerful as artificial intelligence, we need not so much advertising but knowing you can count on the most reliable product possible. We develop Constitutional AI: software created starting from the concept that man must always be at the center, in every process.”
The meetings in Brussels began months ago: the objective was to work together so that Claude was already compliant with the rules of the AI Act, in force from next year, and «impermeable» to manipulation in view of the upcoming European elections. «We are always very careful when we launch our products in different countries. We liaise directly with governments to understand how Claude can be most helpful, in compliance with norms and culture where we are.” Next June, Dario and Daniela Amodei are therefore expected in Rome for an official meeting with the government. A return to Italy, where Daniela — with his son Galileo and her husband – and Dario spend their summer holidays, in Tuscany where his father was born. “But in separate places: it’s the only time of the year when we allow ourselves not to be together.”
