When Chris Scammell arrived in London in 2022 to work at an artificial-intelligence safety startup, Conjecture, he moved into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the heart of the city.
It was an apt home base for Scammell. His spiritual practice had evolved alongside his mounting fears about AI.
Back in 2021, Scammell worked at a hedge fund in Manhattan and lived with friends, two machine learning engineers who became prominent voices in AI research. That winter, under the alias Janus, the trio began drafting “Simulators,” an early critique of large language models that made waves in Silicon Valley and beyond. In the spring of 2022, the engineers joined the founding team of Conjecture, and Scammell was invited aboard.
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