Meet the Canadian dropout set to reap a multibillion-dollar windfall from Anthropic’s IPO

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The client was not given the opportunity to put restrictions on the content or review it prior to publication. by BDCMeet the Canadian dropout set to reap a multibillion-dollar windfall from Anthropic's IPOOlah has campaigned for AI safety and publicly discussed Anthropic's mission to make its models moral and virtuousSince co-founding Anthropic in 2021, Christopher Olah has served as its interpretability research lead, tackling the technical questions of why its AI models act the way they do. Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty ImagesAmong Anthropic PBC’s seven co-founders set to reap a multibillion-dollar windfall as it goes public is Canadian Christopher Olah, a machine learning researcher who got his start working for and then dropping out of the University of Toronto, alongside a couple of early stints at Environment Canada and an Ottawa tech company.THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLYSubscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman, and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLESSubscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLESCreate an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountIn 2021, Olah and six of his OpenAI OpCo LLC colleagues took a gamble by leaving the company, which was then a rising artificial intelligence lab, and launching their own venture, Anthropic, to focus on what they called ethical and safe AI.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.That bet is about to pay off as Anthropic plans to go public in what could be the world’s largest-ever initial public offering (IPO). Its seven co-founders, who each hold Anthropic stakes valued at US$15.5 billion at the time of its last fundraise, are primed to collect even more post-IPO and take controlling stakes in a company hurtling toward a US$1-trillion-plus valuation.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThat’s a far cry from when Olah was struggling to fit in at elementary school in Toronto, but he excelled academically in high school, his mother Frances Zomer said in a 2012 CNBC interview.As a kid, Olah shunned sports, declared himself a vegetarian at age four and obsessed over obscure concepts such as black holes, while his sixth-grade principal said he would be “lucky” to graduate high school, Zomer said.He later attended Abelard School, a selective private school, where he ended up auditing University of Toronto courses by Grade 10 and writing its ecological modelling software.After dropping out of university in 2011 to help a friend beat terrorism charges, Olah made his Silicon Valley debut.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.In June 2012, Olah secured a US$100,000 Thiel Fellowship, funded by PayPal Holdings Inc. founder Peter Thiel, to research 3D printing. That opened doors for Olah because being validated by a third party made it “much easier to do unusual things,” he said in an interview on the 80,000 Hours podcast in 2021.His research attracted the attention of the Bay Area’s largest tech labs, and he worked from 2014 to 2018 at Google LLC’s AI and deep learning arm, Google DeepMind (then known as Google Brain), where he studied and co-published papers on neural networks and advanced to a research scientist role.Olah’s work on mechanistic interpretability, a field of study that seeks to explain how neural networks learn, operate and produce outputs, landed him a job at OpenAI as its technical lead for the interpretability team from 2018 to 2020.Since co-founding Anthropic in 2021, he has served as its interpretability research lead, tackling the technical questions of why its AI models act the way they do. Anthropic makes advanced large language models from Claude to the restricted Mythos.This advertisement has not loaded yet.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.Olah has also campaigned for AI safety and publicly discussed Anthropic’s mission to make its models moral and virtuous. The company’s cofounders say their overarching goals are to ensure they and AI positively impact the world and all seven have promised to donate 80 per cent of their net worth to charity.In May, Olah, the self-professed former evangelical-Christian-turned-atheist, sat beside Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican during the pontiff’s AI encyclical. The pope called for the “moralization of machines (and) alignment of AI with human values, and Olah advocated for those outside of tech to keep tabs on AI companies such as Anthropic.“Every frontier AI lab — including Anthropic — operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Olah said at the event.“If we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives, people who care about things going well and insist on safety … who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.”We apologize, but this video has failed to load.This advertisement has not loaded yet.Notice for the Postmedia NetworkThis website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.