2010 Caltech oral history reveals physicist Tom Tombrello called young Dario Amodei sellable to any government
ResultBackground2450 · reddit · 2026-10-26
A Reddit user dug up a 2010 Caltech oral history interview with physicist Tom Tombrello, which includes extensive praise of a young Dario Amodei, now Anthropic's CEO.
Tombrello called Dario a fantastic Physics 11 student and joked he "could have sold him to any national government as a treasure." As a freshman, Dario co-designed segmented-mirror telescopes and won Caltech's Green research prize; after clashing with the environment in his sophomore year, Tombrello placed him in a Schlumberger internship in Cambridge, where he competed with and beat postdocs in seismology, publishing two highly mathematical papers. He later finished undergrad at Stanford and pursued a physics PhD at Princeton, moving into neuroscience.
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