AI and the monk: Anthropic goes for swami and friends to tame Claude
Anthropic, an AI research company, consulted with religious scholars and philosophers, including Swami Sarvapriyananda, to discuss AI ethics and consciousness. The collaboration aims to better understand the nature of AI models like Claude and establish appropriate guardrails.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing trend of tech companies seeking interdisciplinary perspectives to address the existential and ethical challenges posed by advanced AI.
TOI correspondent from Washington: When Silicon Valley runs into a problem it cannot solve with computing power, it usually hires more engineers and programmers, usually from India. Anthropic went one better: it convened a gathering of religious scholars, philosophers, and theologians, including a monk from India, to discuss an increasingly vexing question: What, exactly, is this thing we are building and what should be its guardrails?Among those invited to its San Francisco headquarters early this year was Swami Sarvapriyananda, a scholar of Advaita Vedanta who heads the Vedanta Society of New York. He has since publicly confirmed that Anthropic flew him to California for a philosophical salon connected with training Claude and with AI ethics.
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