‘Very sharp, very ambitious’: Inside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Ph.D. at Princeton

In the spring of 2007, a 24-year-old physics Ph.D. student named Dario Amodei GS ’11 sat across from neuroscience professor Michael Berry in his office in the basement of Guyot Hall and seriously entertained the possibility of pursuing biophysics research for the first time in his academic career. “I would like to thank Michael for introducing me to experimental physics and neuroscience, which have greatly expanded my intellectual horizons,” Amodei would later write in his 2011 doctoral dissertation. The initial impression that Berry got from Amodei as they discussed potential projects “was that he was very, very sharp, but also very ambitious.” “[Amodei] was interested in essentially thinking about technologies that could have a comprehensive impact to address scientific and technological problems,” Berry told The Daily Princetonian.

First reported by The Daily Princetonian. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.