[The Other Side of Dalio: A Testicular Cancer Patient, Musk Admirer, and Believer of Adult Deaths Being Three Times More Costly Than Infant Deaths] Beating AI News Flash: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once suffered from testicular cancer. Diagnosed in 2014, he underwent chemotherapy and ultimately made a full recovery. This experience was previously little known. On November 5th, The New York Times interviewed more than 20 of Dalio's friends, classmates, and former colleagues, attempting to reveal another side of this representative figure of AI safety. Dalio's concern about death and time can be traced back even further. In 2006, his father died of hepatitis C, not living to see the new drugs that would later offer a cure to most patients. Dalio originally studied physics but gradually shifted towards biology, hoping to accelerate medical progress through new technologies. Friends recall that he maintained a rigorous swimming regimen, tried anti-aging supplements, and restricted his calorie intake, frequently discussing the finiteness of time, believing that time is the only non-renewable resource. As early as 2007, Dalio was fascinated by the idea of AI surpassing human intelligence. He predicted to friends that the technological singularity might arrive by 2040, and that humans might even merge with machines. However, he also warned that if AI wasn't developed properly, humanity could be doomed. At the time, he was deeply influenced by AI safety thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky and the effective altruism movement, and even corresponded with Musk. Two sources familiar with the matter revealed that Dalio admired Musk in his youth and even considered working for his company, but ultimately didn't go through with it. In 2010, Dalio wrote on the GiveWell blog that adults have richer and deeper life experiences than infants, therefore he believed the loss of an adult's death could be two to three times greater than that of an infant's death. At the time, he was comparing two charitable projects: one focused on preventing adult tuberculosis, and the other on vaccinating children in Africa. Based on his judgment of the value of life, saving adults seemed more worthwhile. But ultimately, he donated all $10,000 to the children's vaccine project. He valued the latter's reliable execution process and the long-term impact of rewarding efficient charitable organizations. To help more people, he even considered abandoning scientific research and switching to finance. In a 2010 email, he stated that he was considering working in finance because it would allow him to earn more money for charitable donations. This mindset, which believes in rational computation and values the reliability of execution, is also reflected in his views on AI. He believes that super AI could destroy humanity, therefore it must be developed by people who truly value safety and are trustworthy. This strong belief in AI safety gradually evolved within OpenAI into a dispute over who has the right to oversee the technology and who can participate in core projects. In 2018, OpenAI researcher Joshua Achiam opposed appointing Dalio as the company's chief ethics officer. He worried that the Amodei siblings' power was too concentrated and advocated for the introduction of external experts to prevent a few from monopolizing the ethical oversight of AI. Insiders recalled that Dalio raised his voice in person, insisting that no one was more suitable for the position than himself. The conflict intensified around the GPT project. After Ray Dalio and his sister Daniela led the research, they vehemently opposed the involvement of OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Dalio repeatedly gave Altman ultimatums: he would resign if Brockman wasn't removed from the project. Altman ultimately refused to back down. In December 2020, Dalio and his sister, along with several colleagues, left OpenAI and founded Anthropic four weeks later. This split was also intertwined with issues of research ownership, management rights, and long-standing personal grievances. Dalio believed Altman downplayed his contributions and had explicitly stated that he could not work with Brockman. In stark contrast, after Trump's first election as US president in 2016, Dalio expressed concern about the direction of US politics in an internal OpenAI message. He believed that investor Peter Thiel was morally reprehensible for supporting Trump and that OpenAI should not continue to accept his money. However, Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, later became an investor in Anthropic. Today, Dalio's Anthropic is pushing for stricter AI safety oversight. He has also publicly disagreed with tech giants like Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg over his advocacy for restricting chip exports to China, strengthening regulation, and warnings against AI going out of control. Supporters believe he is developing AI responsibly, while critics argue he is trying to give too much technological power to a few companies. Dalio himself declined this interview with The New York Times. [Original Link]