Irish priest and spiritual advisor to Anthropic reacts to U.S. ban on foreign use
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The world of big AI is a never-ending kind of soap opera. So overnight, Anthropic, the big AI company, suspended its latest AI models, that's Mythos 5 and Fable 5, after an export ban from the Trump administration. So the government basically said that these models could not be given to foreign nationals because of security concerns. And indeed, AI, when they came up with these models originally, these are safer versions, they said these models are too dangerous to release. But what you may not know is that there's a priest from Bray
What triggered Anthropic's suspension of AI models?
He's a former tech exec and he's at the centre of the AI world. So he's the parish priest in Los Altos in Silicon Valley. Now, Los Altos is a place where a lot of the tech titans live. This priest has helped shape the church's thinking on AI. He was there when Pope Leo delivered his encyclical. And also, he is a sometimes spiritual advisor to Anthropic. Father Brendan McGuire, good morning.
How are you?
I'm good, thanks. And thanks for getting up. I know it's about, what, 10 to 4 there in Silicon Valley. It is.
But I'm still on French time. I just got back from France, so I'm still in a different zone.
Perfect. Good, good. And listen, Brendan, you're from Bray. You did electronic engineering in UCD. You set up a tech company. You worked in Silicon Valley. So then, in 1994, you left the tech industry to become a priest. Did the vocation come suddenly?
No.
No, I always had it. So I was back in Bray. I used to go to daily mass at Holy Redeemer. And so I always went to daily mass. And of course, I was trying to outrun it, but I guess it caught up with me at some point.
Right. There's no outrunning the big man. And how did you end up then becoming one of the spiritual advisors to Anthropic?
Well, it's a bit of a long story, but I've always, like when I left the business world, I stayed in contact with all my friends.
How does Fr. Brendan McGuire connect technology and spirituality?
And they kind of slowly moved up the echelon and the different companies ended up as CEOs and C-suite people. And I've always stayed in contact with them. And over the years, they would come and talk to me and tell me about how things are changing or different and stuff. And about that, probably about 2015, that kind of got to an accelerated level of sort of anxiety, saying, look, we need help in this side over here. These things are, the things are coming over the hill. This is crazy stuff. You need to help us. And so I organized meetings with one-on-one first and then groups of meeting. And I had a cardinal from Germany at the time. Cardinal Mark came over about 2014, 15, arranged the listening sessions.
And they continued in different ways, in different forms. We formed an organization called iTech, Institute for Technology, Ethics and Culture at Santa Clara University, and a partnership with the Castery of Culture and Education. with uh bishop paul ty who's also a dublin man and um and so we started more formal talks and then um those continued over the years bishop paul had them in in america in rome called the minerva dialogues with different tech people coming to visit there and i had them here with different tax executives and it was in that current company that we uh developed a ongoing relationship and then about uh about the fall of last year we started individual conversations with the co-founder of Anthropic.
And he came to us saying, look, we need a little bit of help here. This thing's getting really serious. We need some wisdom. Can you help us gather wisdom figures from all over the world and other religions? And so that's what we did. Over the last nine months, we've been gathering in different forms. Sometimes a small meeting, sometimes a day meeting, sometimes a two-day meeting. where we gather different wisdom figures from inside the Catholic Church or sometimes across different religions. And so that's how it developed.
So, Brendan, Anthropic, people will know, is the kind of ethical AI company, is their thing, right? And they wrestle with their conscience a lot about what this thing might do and everything. You kind of wonder, would the ethical thing, would the spiritual thing to advise them to do now not be to just stop?
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