No, Pope Leo XIV — the 267th Bishop of Rome, who leads over 1.4 billion Catholics — is not becoming a member of Anthropic.
After the Vatican invited Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah to assist unveil the pope’s big letter warning about AI— and he publicly thanked Olah — the web began joking that considered one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups had recruited the top of the Catholic Church.
Throughout his speech, the pope thanked Olah — who was sitting a number of seats down — for coming, and pledged to work collectively to “discover a method for humanity on this time of synthetic intelligence.”
The San Francisco AI startup does have an in-house philosopher tasked with educating its chatbot to be ethical. Anthropic has additionally gained a status for hiring high-profile individuals, lately bringing on AI star Andrej Karpathy and the chief technical officers of Stripe and Workday.
Nonetheless, the memes are simply jokes. (Enterprise Insider did attain out to Anthropic simply to verify, however it did not instantly reply.)
Tech corporations, together with Amazon, Google, and Meta, are all lobbying the Vatican to work extra intently on AI. Anthropic’s longtime concentrate on AI security brings it closest to the Vatican’s view that AI must be “disarmed.”
An ominous warning
In his speech, Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, mentioned there have been three areas the place the Vatican’s voice was wanted.
One is supporting the poor if AI displaces human labor on a really massive scale. Second is ensuring that people who use AI can “flourish” — like ensuring chatbots don’t ruin kids’ minds.
Olah’s third level was probably the most mysterious. He mentioned humanity must intently study what is going on inside AI fashions, and hinted that they may be showing signs of consciousness.
“We preserve discovering issues which are mysterious, even unsettling. We discover constructions that mirror outcomes from human neuroscience. We discover proof of introspection,” Olah mentioned.
“I do not know what meaning, however I feel it warrants ongoing discernment.”
