Asia Tech x Singapore 2024, 02: Plenary with Dario, Mira and Gullnaz
In this three-day event, May 29-31, Expo Singapore, speakers comprise a virtual who’s who. If you happen to land on the plenary session and find yourself on the fireside, you would be chatting in the august company of Dario Amodei and Mira Murati. Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, an AI research company. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, dedicated to building steerable AI systems that people can rely on, and generating research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant for tasks at any scale, and is based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.
If you think he looks too young to have achieved all that he has, well let me tell you that he is all of 41 years old. Previously, Dario served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large AI language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3. He is also the co-inventor of reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that powers conversational AI systems like ChatGPT and models created by Anthropic. Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist.
Dario earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
On the other side of the fireside is Mira Murati. Ermira, to be precise, Mira is Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E. She leads the company’s research, product, and safety teams, which work together to create safe and powerful AI that benefits humanity and has a positive impact on the world. Mira and her teams are pushing the frontiers of what AI can do, making it safer, and aligning it with human intentions and values.
Three days ago, she posted on a social network that her company had introduced the Model Spec, starting a public process on shaping desired model behavior — giving stakeholders more agency over steering AI models as they significantly improve in decision making and instruction following capabilities.
Gullnaz (never mind the extra l) means the one of whom flowers are proud. Meet Gullnaz Baig, the Executive Director of the Angsana Council, at Monk's Hill Ventures, (it’s time young monks took over), an advisory council examining the intersection of technology and growth for Southeast Asia. She’s been there for 1 year and 1 month. The Council advocates for sustainable historical growth for the region, while profiling its technological and economic prowess to the rest of the world. She spearheads the Council’s strategy, operations and research programmes while building out its network of partners.
Prior to this role, Gullnaz's worked in both the public and private sectors. She worked on policy review for the Singapore government and led policy experts at big tech including Meta and TikTok, in charge of driving product development that's safe and compliant. In her spare time, she volunteers to advise startups on building products that are safe by design.