# Jaan Tallinn

Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian billionaire computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa.
Recognized as a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence, Tallinn is a leading investor and advocate for AI safety.
He was a Series A investor and board member at DeepMind (later acquired by Google) alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other early supporters. Tallinn also led the Series A funding round for Anthropic, an AI safety-focused company where he is now a board observer.
Tallinn is a leading figure in the field of existential risk, having co-founded both the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom and the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.

## Life

Tallinn graduated from the University of Tartu in Estonia in 1996 with a BSc in theoretical physics with a thesis that considered travelling interstellar distances using warps in spacetime.
Tallinn founded Bluemoon in Estonia alongside schoolmates Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu. Bluemoon's Kosmonaut 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 Swedish Tele2 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 for Niklas Zennström and Janus 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 by eBay.
In 2014, he invested in the reversible debugging software for app development Undo. He also made an early investment in DeepMind which was purchased by Google in 2014 for $600 million (~$761 million in 2023). Other investments include Faculty, a British AI startup focused on tracking terrorists, and Pactum, an "autonomous negotiation" startup based in California and Estonia.
According to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, Tallinn loaned Sam Bankman-Fried about $100 million (~$120 million in 2023), and had recalled the loan by 2018.
As of 2019, Tallinn is married and has six children.

## Other tenures

* Member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
* Former member of the Estonian President's Academic Advisory Board.
* Co-founder of the personalized medical research company MetaMed.
Tallinn is a participant and donator to the effective altruism movement. He donated over a million dollars to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute since 2015. His initial donation when co-founding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in 2012 was around $200,000 (~$262,438 in 2023).

## Views

Tallinn strongly promotes the study of existential risk and has given numerous talks on this topic. His main worries are related to artificial intelligence, unknowns coming from technological development, synthetic biology and nanotechnology. He believes humanity is not spending enough resources on long-term planning and mitigating threats that could wipe us out as a species. He has been a supporter of the Rationalist movement. He has also contributed to Chatham House, supporting their work on the nuclear threat.
His views on the AI alignment problem have been influenced by the writings of Eliezer 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". 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%.
When employees of OpenAI left to form Anthropic, primarily out of concerns that OpenAI was not focused enough on AI 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”.
In March 2023, Tallinn signed an open 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 than GPT-4", and in May, he signed a statement from the Center for AI Safety which read "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".