Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Was Unusually Worried About The Y2K Bug, High School Teacher Recalls

Long before he was warning the world about what artificial intelligence might do to it, a teenage Dario Amodei was losing sleep over a different kind of apocalyptic computer scenario — the Y2K bug. Richard Shapiro, who taught Amodei AP Physics at San Francisco’s Lowell High School in the late 1990s, recently recalled to the San Francisco Chronicle just how seriously his star student took the turn-of-the-millennium computer glitch, in which systems using two-digit year formats were feared to malfunction once the calendar rolled over to 2000. While most people, including Shapiro himself, treated Y2K as an overblown inconvenience, Amodei was genuinely rattled by it, the retired teacher said.

First reported by OfficeChai. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.