Tim Smith
March 29, 2023
Sometimes it takes a maverick to stand up to the power of big corporations. In the case of then-24-year-old self-taught coder Connor Leahy it took “a bunch of Ritalin” and two weeks of forced seclusion in a dorm room.
His goal? To reverse-engineer OpenAI’s latest large language model (LLM) in 2019 to work out what was going on under the hood.
This bootleg experiment marked the beginning of a journey that’s led him to launching his own startup, Conjecture, which is backed by some of the world’s most influential technologists. He’s focusing on AI alignment, or the task of making machine learning models controllable, and he makes no bones about the risks.