Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology: Then, in his early 20s, Amodei’s life changed forever. His father Riccardo, who’d long fought a rare illness, lost the battle in 2006. Riccardo’s passing shocked Amodei, and he shifted his graduate studies at Princeton from theoretical physics to biology to address human illness and biological problems.
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Upon recalling his father’s death, Amodei grows animated. His calls for export controls and AI safeguards, he believes, have been mischaracterized as the actions of someone irrationally seeking to impede AI progress. “I get really angry when someone’s like, ‘This guy’s a doomer. He wants to slow things down,’” Amodei tells me. “You heard what I just said, my father died because of cures that could have happened a few years [earlier]. I understand the benefit of this technology.”…