Anthropic has hired 37-year-old Scottish philosopher Amanda Askell to work on giving Claude an AI «personality.» However, billionaire Elon Musk, who has 14 children, believes she is not suited to the role.
Anthropic has hired 37-year-old Scottish philosopher Amanda Askell to work on giving Claude an AI «personality.» However, billionaire Elon Musk, who has 14 children, believes she is not suited to the role.
«Those who don’t have children lack interest in the future,» Musk wrote on Twitter, responding to a Wall Street Journal article about Amanda Askell, which did not specify whether she had children.
Musk, 53, was previously reported to be the father of 14 children by four different mothers, including singer Grimes. The billionaire’s true number of children may be even higher, sources told the WSJ.
Elon Musk also influenced the formation of Grok, an AI created by his company xAI. Last fall, Grok began to praise Musk endlessly, crossing all boundaries of logic. He called him the greatest man in history, whose moral qualities surpass Jesus Christ. The billionaire claimed that the AI was broken by users with their malicious prompts.
«I think it depends on how much you care about people in general, not just your own family. I do plan to have children, but I still feel like I have a strong vested interest in the future because it’s really important to me that people thrive, even if they’re not my family,» Askell responded to Musk’s attack.
She says that caring for your children can make you feel «a new and very deep sense of belonging to the future,» and she understands people who want to convey that feeling.
«I am too right for the left and too left for the right. I am too passionate about the humanities for those who are in technology, and too passionate about technology for those who are in the humanities. I understand that the lack of polarization is polarizing enough in itself,» the philosopher later wrote.
Amanda Askell, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI in 2024, will study Claude’s reasoning models. She will interact with the AI and shape its personality through prompts that can run for more than 100 pages. According to Askell, there is a «human element» to the AI models and they «will inevitably form a sense of identity.»
