Biography|Dario Amodei — The Public High School on Eucalyptus Drive

People who meet Dario Amodei as the chief executive of Anthropic tend to start the story in a San Francisco laboratory.

The first public building that shaped the path sits on the city's west side, at 1101 Eucalyptus Drive.

Amodei was born in San Francisco in 1983.

He grew up in the city, the child of Riccardo Amodei, a leather craftsman from Massa Marittima in Tuscany, and Elena Engel, a Chicago-born library project manager.

He graduated from Lowell High School.

Lowell is the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi, opened in 1856 and still run by the San Francisco Unified School District.

The present campus occupies several blocks bounded by Eucalyptus Drive, 25th Avenue, Winston Drive, and Lake Merced Boulevard.

The main public entrance is below street level on Eucalyptus Drive.

This is a magnet school, not a private academy.

From this campus he went first to the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with the physicist Tom Tombrello in the Physics 11 course.

He later transferred and took a bachelor's degree in physics at Stanford University in 2006.

Bloomberg's profile of him records the same sequence: classes at Berkeley while still in high school, two years at Caltech, then Stanford.

The usual founder story skips the municipal high school.

Stand at the Eucalyptus Drive doors and the later titles look less like a sudden arrival in machine learning and more like a San Francisco public-school physics student who kept going.

The pin is the school, a documented public campus, not a private house.

The portrait attached is from 2023, years after he left this block.

Photo: Blackjack48, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Lowell front entrance). Portrait: Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0.