Interview

March 29, 2023

'We are super, super fucked': Meet the man trying to stop an AI apocalypse

Connor Leahy reverse-engineered GPT-2 in his bedroom — and what he found scared him. Now, his startup Conjecture is trying to make AI safe


Tim Smith

6 min read

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. 

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Tim Smith

Tim Smith was news editor at Sifted. He covered deeptech and AI, and produced Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast . Follow him on X and LinkedIn

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