Jaan Tallinn: from Skype to investing in safe AI

Estonian programmer and investor Jaan Tallinn, known for his part in creating Skype and the file-sharing service Kazaa, was among the first to put money into artificial intelligence developers. He was an investor in and a board member of DeepMind even before Google bought the company. In 2021 Tallinn led a $124 million Series A round for Anthropic, a company working on safe AI.

Tallinn was born on 14 February 1972 in Tallinn. In 1996 he graduated from the University of Tartu with a bachelor's degree in theoretical physics; his thesis dealt with interstellar travel through distortions of space-time. With schoolmates Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu he founded Bluemoon, and its game Kosmonaut became the first Estonian game sold abroad in 1989.

Later Tallinn developed FastTrack and Kazaa for Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, and the Kazaa peer-to-peer technology was then used for Skype around 2003. He sold his Skype shares in 2005, when eBay bought the service. Besides Tallinn, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested in DeepMind; in 2014 Google acquired the company for $600 million.

For more than a decade Tallinn has urged that AI risks be taken seriously. In 2012 he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and contributed about $200,000 to it, and he also co-founded the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His main concerns are artificial intelligence, the unknown consequences of technological development, synthetic biology and nanotechnology.

Tallinn's views on AI alignment were influenced by the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky. In 2023 he said he had not met anyone in AI labs who put the risk that training the next model would "blow up the planet" at less than 1%. He signed the Future of Life Institute's calls to pause training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 and later to ban the development of superintelligence until there is broad scientific consensus on safety.

Translation editor: Салтанов А.