Jaan Tallinn | |
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| Born | (1972-02-14)14 February 1972 (age 54)[1] Tallinn, Estonia |
| Education | University of Tallinn (BSc)[contradictory] |
| Occupations | programmer, investor, philanthropist, the city of Tallinn |
| Known for | Kazaa Skype Existential risk Tallinn |
Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estoniancomputer programmer and investor[2][3] known for his participation in the development ofSkype and file-sharing applicationFastTrack/Kazaa.[4]
Recognized as a prominent figure in the field ofartificial intelligence, Tallinn is an investor and advocate for AI safety.
He was aSeries A investor andboard member atDeepMind (later acquired by Google) alongsideElon Musk,Peter Thiel and other early supporters.[5] Tallinn also led theSeries A funding round forAnthropic, an AI safety-focused company where he is now a board observer.[6]
Tallinn is involved in the field ofexistential risk, having co-founded both theCentre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at theUniversity of Cambridge, in theUnited Kingdom[7][8] and theFuture of Life Institute inCambridge, Massachusetts, in theUnited States.[9][10][11][12]
Tallinn graduated from theUniversity of Tartu inEstonia in 1996 with a BSc intheoretical physics with a thesis that considered travellinginterstellar distances usingwarps inspacetime.
Tallinn founded Bluemoon in Estonia alongside schoolmatesAhti Heinla andPriit Kasesalu. Bluemoon'sKosmonaut became, in 1989 (SkyRoads is the 1993 remake), the first Estonian game to be sold abroad, and earned the company US$5,000 (~$12,683 in 2024). By 1999, Bluemoon faced bankruptcy; its founders decided to acquire remote jobs for the SwedishTele2 at a salary of US$330 (~$623.00 in 2024) each per day. The Tele2 project, "Everyday.com", was a commercial flop. Subsequently, while working as a stay-at-home father, Tallinn developed FastTrack and Kazaa forNiklas Zennström andJanus Friis (formerly of Tele2). Kazaa's P2P technology was later repurposed to drive Skype around 2003. Tallinn sold his shares in Skype in 2005, when it was purchased byeBay.[13][8]
In 2014, he invested in the reversible debugging software for app developmentUndo.[14] He also made an early investment inDeepMind which was purchased byGoogle in 2014 for $600 million (~$781 million in 2024).[15] Other investments include Faculty, a British AI startup focused on tracking terrorists,[16] and Pactum, an "autonomous negotiation" startup based in California and Estonia.[17]
According to sources cited by theWall Street Journal, Tallinn loanedSam Bankman-Fried about $100 million (~$123 million in 2024), and had recalled the loan by 2018.[18]
As of 2019, Tallinn is married and has six children.[8]
Tallinn is a participant and donator to theeffective altruism movement.[22][23] He donated over a million dollars to theMachine Intelligence Research Institute since 2015.[24] His initial donation when co-founding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in 2012 was around $200,000 (~$269,299 in 2024).[8]
Tallinn strongly promotes the study of existential risk and has given numerous talks on this topic.[25] His main worries are related toartificial intelligence, unknowns coming from technological development,synthetic biology andnanotechnology.[26][27] He believes humanity is not spending enough resources on long-term planning and mitigating threats that could wipe us out as a species.[28] He has been a supporter of theRationalist movement.[29] He has also contributed toChatham House, supporting their work on the nuclear threat.
His views on theAI alignment problem have been influenced by the writings ofEliezer Yudkowsky. Tallinn recalls that "the overall idea that caught my attention that I never had thought about was that we are seeing the end of an era during which the human brain has been the main shaper of the future".[30] He says he's yet to meet anyone working at AI labs who thinks the risk of training the next-generation model "blowing up the planet" is less than 1%.[31]
When employees ofOpenAI left to formAnthropic, primarily out of concerns that OpenAI was not focused enough onAI safety, Tallinn invested in the new company. However, he was unsure if he had made the right decision, arguing that "on the one hand, it’s great to have this safety-focused thing. On the other hand, this is proliferation". Tallinn praised Anthropic for having a greater safety focus than other AI companies, but said "that doesn’t change the fact that they’re dealing with dangerous stuff and I’m not sure if they should be. I’m not sure if anyone should be”.[32]
Tallinn helped get thepronatalist Pragmatist Foundation, created bySimone and Malcolm Collins, off the ground, with a donation of $482,000.[33]
In March 2023, Tallinn signed anopen letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful thanGPT-4".[34][35] In May 2023, he signed astatement from theCenter for AI Safety which read "Mitigating therisk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".[36][37] In October 2025, he signed astatement from theFuture of Life Institute calling for "a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in".[citation needed]
Tallinn learned the importance of feedback loops himself the hard way, after seeing the demise of one of his startups, medical consulting firm Metamed.
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