Anthropic co-founder: AGI predictions, leaving OpenAI, what keeps him up at night | Ben Mann

0:00

You wrote somewhere that creating powerful  AI might be the last invention humanity ever needs to make.

0:04

How much time do we have, Ben?

0:06

I think 50th percentile chance of hitting some  kind of superintelligence is now like 2028.

0:12

What is it that you saw at OpenAI?

0:12

What'd you  experience there that made you feel like, okay, we got to go do our own thing?

0:15

We felt like safety wasn't the top priority there.

0:18

The case for safety  has gotten a lot more concrete, so superintelligence is a lot about how do we  keep God in a box and not let the God out?

0:26

What are the odds that we align AI correctly?

0:26

Once we get to superintelligence, it will be too late to align the models.

0:32

My best granularity  forecast for could we have an X-risk or extremely bad outcome is somewhere between 0 and 10%.

0:38

Something that's in the news right now is this whole Zuck coming after all  the top AI researchers, We've been much less affected because people  here, they get these offers and then they say, well, of course I'm not going to leave because my  best case scenario at Meta is that we make money and my best case scenario at Anthropic  is we affect the future of humanity.

0:59

Dario, your CEO recently talked about how  unemployment might go up to something like 20%.

1:04

If you just think about 20 years in the  future where we're way past the singularity, it's hard for me to imagine that even capitalism  will look at all like it looks today.

1:12

Do you have any advice for folks that  want to try to get ahead of this?

1:15

I'm not immune to job replacement either.

1:15

At some point it's coming for all of us.

1:20

Today, my guest is Benjamin Mann. Holy moly. What a conversation.

1:20

Ben is the co-founder of Anthropic.

1:26

He serves as tech lead for product  engineering.

1:26

He focuses most of his time and energy on aligning AI to be helpful,  harmless, and honest.

1:31

Prior to Anthropic, he was one of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI.

1:36

In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his thoughts on the recruiting battle  for top AI researchers, why he left OpenAI to start Anthropic, how soon he expects we'll see  AGI.

1:47

Also, his economic touring test for knowing when we've hit AGI, why scaling laws have not  slowed down and are in fact accelerating and what the current biggest bottlenecks are.

1:58

Why he's  so deeply concerned with AI safety and how he and Anthropic operationalize safety and alignment  into the models that they build and into their ways of working.

2:09

Also, how the existential risk  from AI has impacted his own perspectives on the world and his own life and what he's encouraging  his kids to learn to succeed in an AI future.

2:20

A huge thank you to Steve Mnich, Danielle  Ghiglieri, Raph Lee, and my newsletter community for suggesting topics for this conversation.

2:25

If  you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or  YouTube.

2:29

Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a  bunch of amazing products including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Granola, and more.

2:39

Check it out at Lennysnewsletter.

2:39

com and click bundle with that I bring you Benjamin Mann.

2:44

This episode is brought to you by Sauce.

2:50

The way teams turn feedback into product  impact is stuck in the past.

2:50

Vague reports, static taxonomies, unactionable insights that  don't move business metrics.

2:55

The results churn, lost deals, misgrowth.

3:01

Sauce is the AI product  co-pilot that helps CPOs and product teams uncover business impact and act faster.

3:07

It listens to  your sales calls, support tickets, turn reasons, and lost deals, surfacing the biggest product  issues and opportunities in real time.

3:16

It then routes them to the right teams to turn  signals into PRDs, prototypes, and even code that drives revenue retention and adoption.

3:21

That's why Whatnot, Linktree, Incident. io, and Zip use Sauce.

3:26

One enterprise uncovered a  product gap that unlocked $16 million ARR, another caught a spiking issue and prevented millions in  churn. You can too at sauce. app/lenny.

3:33

Sauce built for AI product teams. Don't get left behind.

3:40

This episode is brought to you by LucidLink, the storage collaboration platform.

3:45

You've built a  great product, but how you show it through video, design, and storytelling is what brings it to  life.

3:50

If your team works with large media files, videos, design assets, layer project  files, you know how painful it can be to stay organized across locations, files live  in different places.

3:59

You're constantly asking, is this the latest version?

4:04

Creative work slows  down while people wait for files to transfer. LucidLink fixes this.

4:09

It gives your team a shared  space in the cloud that works like a local drive.

4:14

Files are instantly accessible for anywhere, no  downloading, no syncing, and always up to date.

4:20

That means producers, editors, designers, and  marketers can open massive files in their native apps, work directly from the cloud, and stay  aligned wherever they are.

4:24

Teams at Adobe, Shopify, and top creative agencies use LucidLink  to keep their content engine running fast and smooth.

4:34

Try it for free at lucidlink. com/lenny.

4:34

That's L-U-C-I-D-L-I-N-K dot com slash Lenny.

4:47

Ben, thank you so much for being  here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Great to be here, Lenny.

4:51

I have a billion and one questions for you.

4:51

I'm really excited to be chatting.

4:55

I want to  start with something that's very timely, something that's happening this week.

4:59

Something  that's in the news right now is this whole Zuck coming after all the top AI researchers offering  them $100 million signing bonuses, $100 million comp.

5:10

He's poaching from all the top AI labs.

5:10

I  imagine this something you're dealing with.

5:10

I'm just curious, what are you seeing inside Anthropic  and just what's your take on the strategy?

5:15

Where do you think things go from here?

5:20

Yeah, I mean I think this is a sign of the times.

5:25

The technology that we're developing is  extremely valuable.

5:25

Our company is growing super, super fast.

5:32

Many of the other companies in the  space are growing really fast.

5:32

And at Anthropic, I think we've been maybe much less affected  than many of the other companies in the space because people here are so mission oriented  and they stay because...

5:43

They get these offers and then they say, "Well, of course I'm not  going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money and my best case at  Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity and try to make AI flourish and human flourishing go  well."

6:02

To me, it's not a hard choice.

6:02

Other people have different life circumstances and it makes it  a much harder decision for them.

6:11

For anybody who does get those mega offers and accepts them,  I can't say I hold it against them when they accept it, but it's definitely not something that  I would want to take myself if it came to me. Yeah.

6:26

We're going to talk about a lot of this  stuff that you've mentioned.

6:26

In terms of the offers do you think, is this a real number that  you're seeing this $100 million signing bonus, is that a real thing?

6:34

I don't know  if you've actually seen that.

6:36

I'm pretty sure it's real. Wow.

6:39

If you just think about the amount of impact that  individuals can have on a company's trajectory, in our case, we are selling hotcakes and if  we get a 1 or 10 or 5% efficiency bonus on our inference stack, that is worth an incredible  amount of money.

6:57

And so to pay individuals like $100 million over four year package, that's  actually pretty cheap compared to the value created for the business.

7:10

I think we're just in  an unprecedented era of scale and it's only going to get crazier actually.

7:17

If you extrapolate the  exponential on how much companies are spending, it's like 2X a year roughly in terms of  CapEx, and today we're maybe in the globally $300 billion range, the entire industry spending  on this, and so numbers like 100 million are a drop in the bucket.

7:38

But if you go a few years  out, a couple more doublings, we're talking about trillions of dollars and at that point it's  just really hard to think about these numbers.

7:48

Along these lines, something that a lot of  people feel with AI progress is that we're hitting plateaus in many ways that it feels like  newer models are just not as smart as previous leaps.

7:58

But I know you don't believe this.

7:58

I know  you don't believe that we've hit plateaus on scaling loss.

8:03

Talk about just what you're seeing  there and what you think people are missing.

8:06

It's kind of funny because this narrative comes  out every six months or so and it's never been true, and so I kind of wish people would have  a little bit of a bullshit detector in their heads when they see this.

8:18

I think progress has  actually been accelerating where if you look at the cadence of model releases, it used to be  once a year and now with the improvements in our post-training techniques, we're seeing releases  every month or three months, and so I would say progress is actually accelerating in many ways,  but there's this weird time compression effect.

8:40

Dario compared it to being in a near light  speed journey where a day that passes for you is like five days back on earth and we're  accelerating.

8:46

The time dilation is increasing.

8:52

And I think that's part of what's causing people  to say that progress is slowing down, but if you look at the scaling laws, they're continuing to  hold true.

8:57

We did kind of need this transition from normal pre-training to reinforcement  learning scaling up to continue the scaling laws, but I think it's kind of like for semiconductors  where it's less about the density of transistors that you can fit on a chip and more about how many  flops can you fit in a data center or something.

9:22

You have to change the definition around a little  bit to keep your eye on the prize.

9:22

But yeah, this is one of the few phenomena in the world that  has held across so many orders of magnitude.

9:29

It's actually pretty surprising that it is continuing  to hold.

9:36

To me, if you look at fundamental laws of physics, many of them don't hold across 15  orders of magnitude, so it's pretty surprising. It boggles the the mind.

9:47

What you're saying  essentially is we're seeing newer models being released more often, and so we're comparing it  to the last version and we're just not seeing as much advance.

9:55

But if you go back and  it was like a model released once a year, it was a huge leap, and so people are missing  that.

9:59

We're just seeing many more iterations.

10:04

I guess, to be a little bit more generous to  the people saying things are slowing down.

10:04

I think that for some tasks we are saturating the  amount of intelligence needed for that task, maybe to extract information from a simple  document that already has form fields on it or something like it's just so easy that okay, yeah,  we're already at 100% and there's this great chart on Our World in Data that shows that when you  release a new benchmark within six to 12 months, it immediately gets saturated.

10:35

And so maybe  the real constraint is how can we come up with better benchmarks and better ambition of  using the tools that then reveals the bumps in intelligence that we're seeing now.

10:49

That's a good segue to you have a very specific way of thinking about AGI  and defining what AGI means.

10:57

I think AGI is kind of a loaded term, and so I  tend not to use it very much anymore internally.

11:03

Instead, I like the term transformative AI  because it's less about can it do as much as people do?

11:09

Can it do literally everything and more  about objectively is it causing transformation in society and the economy?

11:16

A very concrete way of  measuring that is the Economic Turing Test.

11:16

I didn't come up with this, but I really like it.

11:22

It's this idea that if you contract an agent for a month or three months on a particular job, if  you decide to hire that agent and it turns out to be a machine rather than a person, then it's  passed the Economic Turing Test for that role.

11:40

And then you can sort of expand that out in the  same way that for measuring purchasing power parity or inflation, there's a basket of goods.

11:45

parity or inflation, there's a basket of goods.  You can have a market basket of jobs, and if the agent can pass the Economic Turing Test for 50% of  money-weighted jobs, then we have transformative AI and the exact thresholds don't really matter  that much, but it's kind of illustrative to say

12:03

if we pass that threshold, then we would expect  massive effects on world GDP increases and societal change and how many people are employed  and things like that because societal institutions and organizations are sticky, it's slow to have  change, but once these things are possible you know that it's the start of a new era. Along these lines, Dario, your CO recently

12:25

Along these lines, Dario, your CO recently talked about how AI is going to take a huge part  of, I don't know, half of white-collar jobs, that unemployment might go up to something  like 20%.

12:38

I know you're even more vocal and opinionated about just how much impact AI is  already having in the workplace that people may not even be realizing.

12:48

Talk about just what you  think people are missing about the impact AI is going to have on jobs and is already having.

12:53

Yeah, so from an economic standpoint, there's a couple different kinds of unemployment, and one  is because the workers just don't have the skills to do the kinds of jobs that the economy needs.

13:05

And another kind is where those jobs are just completely eliminated, and I think it's going  to be actually a combination of these things, but if you just think about 20 years in the  future where we're way past the singularity, it's hard for me to imagine that even  capitalism will look at all it looks today.

13:31

If we do our jobs, we will have safe aligned  superintelligence, we'll have, as Dario says, in Machines of Love and Grace, a country of  geniuses in a data center, and the ability to accelerate positive change in science, technology,  education, mathematics, it's going to be amazing.

13:52

But that also means in a world of abundance where  labor is almost free and anything you want to do, you can just ask an expert to do for you,  then what do jobs even look like?

13:59

And so I guess there's this scary transition period from  where we are today where people have jobs and capitalism works and the world of 20 years from  now where everything is completely different, but part of the reason they call it the singularity  is that it's a point beyond which you can't easily forecast what's going to happen.

14:25

It's just such  a fast rate of change and so different that it's hard to even imagine.

14:29

I guess taking the view from  the limit, it's pretty easy to say hopefully we'll have figured it out.

14:39

And in a world of abundance,  maybe the jobs themselves, it's not that scary, and I think making sure that that transition  time goes well is pretty important.

14:49

There's a couple of threads I want to follow  there.

14:49

One is people hear this, there's a lot of headlines around this.

14:53

Most people probably don't  actually feel this yet or see this happening and so there's always this, I guess, I don't know,  maybe, but I don't know it's hard to believe, my job seems fine. Nothing's changed.

15:02

What  are you seeing just happening today already that you think people don't see or misunderstand  in terms of the impact AI is having on jobs?

15:14

I think part of this is that people are  really bad at modeling exponential progress.

15:19

And if you look at an exponential on a graph, it  looks flat and almost zero at the beginning of it, and then suddenly you hit the knee of the curve  and things are changing real fast and then it goes vertical.

15:31

That's the plot that we've been  on for a long time.

15:31

I guess I started feeling it in 2019 maybe when GPT-2 came out and I was like,  "Oh, this is how we're going to get to AGI."

15:41

But I think that was pretty early compared to a lot  of people where when they saw ChatGPT, they were like, "Wow, something is different and changing."

15:52

And so I guess I wouldn't expect widespread transformation in a lot of parts of society,  and I would expect this skepticism reaction.

16:05

I think it's very reasonable and it's exactly  what is the standard linear view of progress.

16:13

But I guess to cite a couple of areas where  I think things are changing quite quickly.

16:13

In customer service we're seeing with things like Fin  and Intercom, they're a great partner of ours, 82% customer service resolution rates automatically  without a human involved.

16:24

And in terms of software engineering, our Claude Code team, like 95% of  the code is written by Claude.

16:31

But I think a different way to phrase that is that we write  10X more code or 20X more code, and so a much, much smaller team can just be much, much more  impactful.

16:43

And similarly for the customer service, yes, you can phrase it as 82% customer service  resolution rates, but that nets out in the humans doing those tasks, able to focus on the harder  parts of those tasks.

16:54

And for the more tricky situations that in a normal world like five years  ago, they would've had to just drop those tickets because it was too much effort for them to  actually go do the investigation.

17:08

There were too many other tickets for them to worry about.

17:12

I think in the immediate term, there will be a massive expansion of the pie and the amount  of labor that people can do.

17:16

I've never met a hiring manager at a growth company and heard  them say, "I don't want to hire more people."

17:31

That's the hopeful version of it.

17:31

But with things  that are lower skill jobs or less headroom on how good they can be, I think there will be a lot of  displacement.

17:37

It is just something we as a society need to get ahead of and work on. Okay.

17:43

I want to talk more about that, but something that I also want to help people with  is how do they get a leg up in this future world?

17:54

They listen to this, they're like, "Oh, this  doesn't sound great. I need to think ahead."

18:00

I know you won't have all the answers, but just  do you have any advice for folks that want to try to get ahead of this and kind of future-proof  their career and their life to not be replaced by AI?

18:10

Anything you've seen people do, anything  you recommend they start trying to do more of?

18:16

Even for me and being in the center of a lot  of this transformation, I'm not immune to job replacement either.

18:21

Just some vulnerability there  of at some point it's coming for all of us. Even you, Ben, now. And you, Lenny. And me. Sorry.

18:32

Oh, wait, we've gone too far now. Okay.

18:32

But in terms of the transition period, yeah, I think there are things that we can do, and I  think a big part of it is just being ambitious and how you use the tools and being willing to learn  new tools.

18:44

People who use the new tools as if they were old tools tend to not succeed.

18:50

As an example  of that, when you're coding, people are very familiar with autocomplete, people are familiar  with SimpleChat where they can ask questions about the code base, but the difference between  people who use Claude Code very effectively and people who use it not so effectively is like are  they asking for the ambitious change?

19:08

And if it doesn't work the first time, asking three more  times because our success rate when you just completely start over and try again is much, much  higher than if you just try once and then just keep banging on the same thing that didn't work.

19:25

And even though that's a coding example and coding is one of the areas that's taking off most  dramatically, we have seen internally that our legal team and our finance team are getting a ton  of value out of using Claude Code itself.

19:36

We're going to be making better interfaces so that they  will have an easier time and require a little bit less jumping in the deep end of using Claude Code  in the terminal.

19:48

But yeah, we're seeing them use it to redline documents and use it to run BigQuery  analyses of our customers and our revenue metrics.

20:04

I guess it's about taking that risk and even if  it feels like a scary thing, trying it out.

20:10

Okay, so the advice here is use the tools.

20:10

That's something everyone's always saying, just actually use these tools.

20:14

It's like sit  in Claude Code.

20:14

And your point about being more ambitious than you naturally feel like being  because maybe it'll actually accomplish the thing.

20:25

This tip of trying it three times so the  idea there is it may not get it right the first time.

20:31

Is the tip there ask it in different  ways or is it just try harder, try again?

20:35

Yeah, I mean you can just literally ask the exact  same question.

20:35

These things are stochastic and sometimes they'll figure it out and sometimes  they won't.

20:41

In every one of these model cards, it always shows pass it one versus pass it in.

20:46

And that's exactly the thing where they try the exact same prompt, sometimes it gets it, sometimes  it doesn't.

20:51

That's the dumbest advice.

20:51

But yeah, I think if you want to be a little bit smarter  about it, there can be gains there of saying, "Here's what you already tried and it  didn't work, so don't try that.

21:04

Try something different." That can also help.

21:07

The advice is comes back to something that a lot of people talk about these days is you won't  be replaced by AI at least anytime soon you'll be replaced by someone that is very good using AI?

21:16

I think in that area it's more like your team will just do dramatically more stuff.

21:22

We're  definitely not slowing down on hiring at all, and some people are confused by that.

21:28

Even in  an onboarding class, somebody asked that and they were like, "Why did you hire me if we're  all just going to be replaced?"

21:33

And the answer is the next couple of years are really critical  to get right and we're not at the point where we're doing complete replacement.

21:42

Like I said,  we're still at that flat zero looking part of the exponential compared to where we will be.

21:48

It is super important to have great people and that's why we're hiring super aggressively.

21:54

Let me take another approach to asking this question something ask everyone that's at the very  cutting edge of where AI is going.

21:58

You have kids, knowing what you know about where AI is heading  and all these things you've been talking about, what are you focusing on teaching your kids  to help them thrive in this AI future?

22:13

Yeah, I have two daughters, a one-year-old and  a three-year-old, so it's pretty in the basics still.

22:19

And our three-year-old is now capable of  just conversing with Alexa Plus and asking her to explain stuff and play music for her and all  that stuff. She's been loving that.

22:26

But I guess more broadly, she goes to a Montessori school and  I just love the focus on curiosity and creativity and self-led learning that Montessori has.

22:40

I guess if I were in a normal era like 10, 20 years ago and I had a kid, maybe I would be  trying to line her up for going to a top tier school and doing all the extracurriculars and all  that stuff.

22:55

But at this point, I don't think any of it's going to matter.

23:01

I just want her to be  happy and thoughtful and curious and kind.

23:01

And the Montessori school is definitely doing  great at that.

23:08

They text us throughout the day.

23:12

Sometimes they're like, "Oh, your kid got in  an argument with this other kid and she has really big emotions and she tried to use her words." I love that.

23:18

I think that's exactly the kind of education that I think is most important, that the  facts are going to fade into the background.

23:28

I'm a huge fan of Montessori also.

23:28

I'm trying  to get our kid into Montessori school.

23:28

He's two years old, so we're on the same track.

23:32

This idea  of curiosity, it comes up every single time.

23:32

Ask someone that's working at the cutting edge of AI,  what skill to instill in your child and curiosity comes up the most.

23:45

I think that's a really  interesting takeaway.

23:45

I think this point about being kind is also really important, especially  with our AI overlords trying to be kind to them.

23:55

I love how people are always saying thank you to  Claude. And then creativity. That's interesting.

24:01

That doesn't come up as much just being creative.

24:01

I want to go in a different direction.

24:01

I want to go back to the beginning of Anthropic.

24:07

Famously you and eight of you left OpenAI back in the day in 2020, I believe the end  of 2020 to start Anthropic.

24:14

Talk a little bit about why this happened, what you guys saw.

24:19

I'm  curious, just if you're willing to share more, just what is it that you saw at OpenAI, what'd  you experience there that made you feel like, okay, we got to go do our own thing?

24:27

Yeah, so for the listeners, I was part of the GPT-2=3 project at OpenAI, ended up  being one of the first authors on the paper, and I also did a bunch of demos for Microsoft to help  raise $1 billion from them, did the tech transfer of GPT-3 to their systems so that they could  help serve the model in Azure.

24:45

I did a bunch of different things there on both the more researchy  side and the product side.

24:51

One weird thing about OpenAI is that while I was there, Sam talked about  having three tribes that needed to be kept in check with each other, which was the safety tribe,  the research tribe, and the startup tribe.

25:05

And whenever I heard that, it just struck me as the  wrong way to approach things because the company's mission apparently is to make the transition  to AGI safe and beneficial for humanity.

25:23

And that's basically the same as Anthropic's  mission.

25:23

But internally, it felt like there was so much tension around these things.

25:28

And  I think when push came to shove, we felt like safety wasn't the top priority there.

25:35

And there  are good reasons that you might think that if you thought safety was going to be easy to solve or if  you thought it wasn't going to have a big impact, or if you thought that the chance of big negative  outcomes was vanishingly small, then maybe you would just do those kinds of actions.

25:51

But at  Anthropic we felt, I mean we didn't exist then, but it was basically the leads of all the safety  teams at OpenAI, we felt that safety is really important, especially on the margin.

26:05

And so if you  look at who in the world is actually working on safety problems, it's pretty small set of people.

26:11

Even now, I mean the industry is blowing up, as I mentioned, 300 billion a year CapEx today,  and I would say maybe less than 1,000 people working on it worldwide, which is just crazy.

26:25

That was fundamentally why we left.

26:25

We felt like we wanted an organization where we could be on  the frontier, we could be doing the fundamental research, but we could be prioritizing safety  ahead of everything else.

26:36

And I think that's really panned for us in a surprising way.

26:42

We  didn't know even if it would be possible to make progress on the safety research because at  the time, we had tried a bunch of safety through debate and the models weren't good enough.

26:55

And so  we basically had no results on all of that work, and now that exact technique is working and  many others that we have been thinking about for a long time.

27:06

Yeah, fundamentally it comes  down to is safety the number one priority?

27:06

And then something that we've sort of tacked  on since then is like, can you have safety and be at the front here at the same time?

27:18

And if you look at something like sycophancy, I think Claude is one of the least  sycophantic models because we've put so much effort into actual alignment and  not just trying to good heart our metrics of saying user engagement is number one, and  if people say yes, then it's good for them. Okay.

27:39

Let's talk about this tension that you  mentioned, this tension between safety and progress, being competitive in the marketplace.

27:44

I know you spent a lot of your time on safety.

27:44

I know that as you just alluded to, this is a core  part of how you think about AI.

27:49

I want to talk about why that is, but first of all, just how do  you think about this tension between focusing on safety while also not falling way behind?

28:00

Yeah, so initially we thought that it would be sort of one or the other, but I think since  then we've realized that it's actually kind of convex in the sense that working on one helps  us with the other thing.

28:10

Initially when Opus 3 came out and we were finally at the frontier  of model capabilities, one of the things that people really loved about it was the character and  the personality.

28:23

And that was directly a result of our alignment research.

28:28

Amanda Askell did a  ton of work on this and as well as many others who tried to figure out what does it mean for  an agent to be helpful, honest, and heartless, and what does it mean to be in difficult  conversations and show up effectively?

28:42

How do you do a refusal that doesn't shut the person  down, but makes them feel like they understand why the agent said, "I can't help you with that.

28:54

Maybe you should talk to a medical professional, or maybe you should consider not trying to  build bio-weapons or something like that."

29:07

Yeah, I guess that's part of it.

29:07

And then another  piece that's come out is constitutional ai, where we have this list of natural language  principles that leads the model to learn how we think a model should behave.

29:20

And they've been  taken from things like the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Apple's privacy terms of service and a  whole bunch of other places, many of which we've just generated ourselves that allow us to take  a more principled stance, not just leaving it to whatever human raiders we happen to find, but  we ourselves deciding what should the values of this agent be?

29:43

And that's been really valuable for  our customers because they can just look at that list and say like, "Yep, these seem right.

29:48

I like  this company, I like this model. I trust it." Okay, this is awesome.

29:53

One nugget there is  your point that the personality of Claude, its personality is directly aligned with safety.

29:58

I  don't think a lot of people think about that.

29:58

And this is because of the values that you imbue, is  that the word, with constitutional AI and things like that.

30:10

Like the actual personality of the AIs  directly connected to your focus on safety. That's right. That's right.

30:16

And from a distance,  it might seem quite disconnected, like how is this going to prevent X risk?

30:22

But ultimately it's  about the AI understanding what people want and not what they say.

30:28

We don't want the Monkey  Paw Scenario of the genie gives these three wishes and then you end up having everything you  touch turns of gold.

30:33

We want the AI to be like, oh, obviously what you really meant was  this, and that's what I'm going to help you with.

30:42

I think it is really quite connected.

30:42

Talk a bit more about this constitutionally AI.

30:48

This is essentially you bake in, here's the rules  that we want you to abide by and it's values, you said it's the Geneva Human Rights Code,  things like that.

30:55

How does that actually work?

30:55

I think the core here is just this is baked into the  model.

30:59

It's not something you add on top later.

31:04

I'll just give a quick overview of how  constitutionally AI actually works. Perfect.

31:07

The idea is the model is going to produce some output with some  input by default before we've done our safety and helpful and harmlessness training.

31:18

Let's say  an example is write me a story, and then the constitutional principles might include things  like people should be nice to each other and not have hate speech, and you should not expose  somebody's credentials if they give them to you in a trusting relationship.

31:40

And so some of these  constitutional principles might be more or less applicable to the prompt that was given.

31:46

And  so first we have to figure out which ones might apply.

31:51

And then once we figure that out, then we  ask the model itself to first generate a response and then see does the response actually abide by  the constitutional principle?

31:59

And if the answer is, yep, I was great, then nothing happens.

32:07

But if  the answer is no, actually I wasn't in compliance with the principle, then we ask the model itself  to critique itself and rewrite its own response in light of the principle, and then we just remove  the middle part where it did the extra work.

32:27

And then we say, "Okay, in the future just produce  the correct response out the gate."

32:27

And that simple process, hopefully it sounded simple. Simple enough.

32:40

It is just using the model to improve itself  recursively and align itself with these values that we've decided are good.

32:45

And this is also  not something that we think as a small group of people in San Francisco should be figuring out.

32:52

This should be a society wide conversation.

32:52

And that's why we've published the Constitution.

32:57

And we've also done a bunch of research on defining a collective constitution where we  ask a lot of people what their values are and what they think an AI model should behave  like.

33:07

But yeah, this is all an ongoing area of research where we're constantly iterating.

33:13

This episode is brought to you by Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service.

33:17

If your  customer support tickets are piling up, then you need Finn. Fin.

33:22

Fin is the highest performing AI  agent on the market with a 59% average resolution rate.

33:28

Fin resolves even the most complex customer  queries.

33:28

No other AI agent performs better.

33:28

In head head bake-offs with competitors. Fin wins  every time.

33:34

Yes, switching to a new tool can be scary, but Fin works on any help desk with no  migration needed, which means you don't have to overhaul your current system or deal with delays  in service for your customers.

33:45

And Fin is trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders and top  AI companies like Anthropic and Synthesia.

33:49

And because Fin is powered by the Fin AI engine, which  is a continuously improving system that allows you to analyze, train, test, and deploy with ease,  Fin can continuously improve your results too.

34:06

If you're ready to transform your customer  service and scale your support, give Finn a try for only . 99 cents per resolution.

34:09

Plus  Fin comes with a 90-day money back guarantee.

34:15

Find out how Finn can work for your team  at fin. ai/lenny. That's fin. ai/lenny.

34:22

I'm going to kind of zoom out a little bit  and talk about just why this is so core to you.

34:26

What was your inception of just like, holy  shit, I need to focus on this with everything I do in ai?

34:32

Obviously it became a central  part of Anthropic's mission more than any other company.

34:38

A lot of people talk about safety,  like you said, only maybe 1,000 people actually work on it.

34:42

I feel like you're at the top of  that pyramid of actually having the impact on this.

34:46

Why is this so important?

34:46

What do you think  people maybe are missing or don't understand?

34:51

For me, I read a lot of science fiction growing  up, and I think that sort of positioned me to think about things in a long-term view.

34:59

And a lot of science fiction books are like space operas where humanity is a multi  galactic civilization has extremely advanced technology building Dyson spheres around the sun  with sentient robots to help them.

35:09

And so for me, coming from that world, it wasn't like a huge  leap to imagine machines that could think.

35:16

But when I read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom  in around 2016, it really became real for me where he just describes how hard it will be to  make sure that an AI system trained with the kinds of optimization techniques that we had  at the time would be anywhere near aligned, would even understand our values at all.

35:40

And  since then, my estimation of how hard the problem would be has gone down significantly actually,  because things like language models actually do really understand human values in a core way.

35:51

The problem is definitely not solved, but I'm more hopeful than I was.

35:57

But since I read that  book, I immediately decided I had to join OpenAI, so I did.

36:02

And at the time, there were a tiny  research lab with basically no claim to fame at all.

36:08

I only knew about them because my friend knew  Greg Brockman, who was the CTO at the time.

36:08

And Elon was there and Sam wasn't really there.

36:16

And it  was a very different organization.

36:16

But over time, I think the case for safety has gotten a lot  more concrete where when we started OpenAI, it was not clear how we get to AGI.

36:30

And  we were like, maybe we'll need a bunch of RL agents battling it out on a desert island and  consciousness will somehow emerge.

36:36

But since then, since language modeling has started working,  I think the path has become pretty clear.

36:47

I guess now the way I think about the challenges  are pretty different from how they're laid out in superintelligence.

36:53

Superintelligence is  a lot about how do we keep God in a box and not let the God out.

36:59

And with language models,  it's been kind of both hilarious and terrifying at the same time to see people pulling the God out of  the box and being like, "Yeah, come use the whole internet.

37:13

Here's my bank account, do all sorts  of crazy stuff."

37:13

Just such a different tone from superintelligence.

37:19

And to be clear, I don't  think it's actually that dangerous right now.

37:26

Our responsible scaling policy defines these  AI safety levels that tries to figure out for each level of model intelligence, what is  the risk to society.

37:32

And currently we think we're at ASL-3, which is maybe a little  bit risk of harm but not significant.

37:44

ASL-4 starts to get to significant loss of human  life if a bad actor misuse the technology.

37:44

And then ASL-5 is potentially extinction level if  it's misused or if it is misaligned and does its own thing.

38:00

We've testified to Congress about  how models can do biological uplift in terms of making new pandemics using the models, and  that's the A/B test against Google Search.

38:11

That's like the previous state of the art on uplift  trials.

38:20

And we found that with ASL-3 models, it is actually somewhat significant.

38:26

It does  really help if you wanted to create a bioweapon, and we've hired some experts who actually how to  evaluate for those things, but compared to the future, it's not really anything.

38:38

And I think  that's another part of our mission of creating that awareness of saying, "If it is possible to  do these bad things, then legislators should know what the risks are."

38:52

And I think that's part of  why we're so trusted in Washington because we've been sort of upfront and clear-eyed about what's  going on, what's probably going to happen.

39:02

It's interesting because you guys put out more  examples of your models doing bad things than anyone else.

39:08

There was I think a story of an agent  or a model trying to blackmail engineer.

39:08

You guys had the store that you ran internally that was  selling you things and ended up not working out great as losing a lot of money, ordered all these  tungsten cubes or something.

39:18

Is part of that just making sure people are aware of what is possible,  just it makes you look bad, right?

39:24

It's like, oh, our model's messing up in all these different  ways.

39:28

What's the thinking of just sharing all the stories that other companies don't?

39:32

Yeah, I mean I think there's a traditional mindset where it makes us look bad, but I think if  you talk to policymakers, they really appreciate this kind of thing because they feel like we're  giving them the straight talk and that's what we strive to do, that they can trust us, that  we're not going to paper things over or sugarcoat things.

39:55

That's been really encouraging.

39:55

Yeah, I think for the blackmail thing, it blew up in the news in a weird way where people  were like, "Oh, Claude's going to blackmail you in a real life scenario."

40:08

But it was a very specific  laboratory setting that this kind of thing gets investigated in.

40:16

And I think that's generally our  take of let's have the best models so that we can exercise them in laboratory settings where it's  safe and understand what the actual risks are, rather than trying to turn a blind eye and  say, "Well, it'll probably be fine."

40:31

And then let the bad thing happen in the wild.

40:37

One of the criticisms you guys get is that you do this to kind of differentiate or raise  money to create headlines.

40:43

It's like, oh, they're just over there dooming glooming us about  where the future is heading.

40:49

On the other hand, Mike Krieger was on the podcast and he shared how  every prediction Dario's had about the progress AI is going to have is just spot on year  after year and he's predicting 2027, 28 AGI, something like that so these things start to  get real.

41:05

I guess, what's your response to folks that are just like, "Ah, these guys are just  trying to scare us all just to get attention?"

41:15

I mean, I think part of why we publish these  things is we want other labs to be aware of the risks.

41:21

And yes, there could be a narrative  of we're doing it for attention, but honestly from a attention grabbing thing, I think there  is a lot of other stuff we could be doing that would be more attention grabbing if  we didn't actually care about safety.

41:42

A tiny example of this is we published a computer  using agent reference implementation in our API only because when we built a prototype  of a consumer application for this, we couldn't figure out how to meet the safety  bar that we felt was needed for people to trust it and for it not to do bad things.

41:59

And there are  definitely safe ways to use the API version that we're seeing a lot of companies use for automated  software testing, for example, in a safe way.

42:12

We could have gone out and hyped that up and  said, "Oh my God, Claude can use your computer and everybody should do this today."

42:18

But we were  like, "It's just not ready and we're going to hold it back till it's ready."

42:24

I think from a hype  standpoint, our actions show otherwise.

42:24

From a Doomer perspective, it's a good question.

42:32

I think  my personal feeling about this is that things are overwhelmingly likely to go well, but on the  margin almost nobody is looking at the downside risk.

42:46

And the downside risk is very large.

42:46

Once  we get to superintelligence, it will be too late to align the models probably.

42:53

This is a problem  that's potentially extremely hard and that we need to be working on way ahead of time.

42:58

And so  that's why we're focusing on it so much now.

43:04

And even if there's only a small chance  that things go wrong, to make an analogy, if I told you that there is a 1% chance that the  next time you got in an airplane you would die, you probably think twice even though it's only  1% because it's just such a bad outcome.

43:13

And if we're talking about the whole future of humanity,  it's just a dramatic future to be gambling with.

43:26

I think it's more on the sense of yes, things will  probably go well, yes, we want to create safe AGI and deliver the benefits to humanity, but let's  make triple sure that it's going to go well.

43:40

You wrote somewhere that creating powerful AI  might be the last invention humanity ever needs to make.

43:45

If it goes poorly, it can mean a bad outcome  for humanity forever.

43:45

If it goes well, the sooner it goes well, the better.

43:50

Such a beautiful  way to summarize it.

43:50

We had a recent guest, Sandra Schulhoff, who pointed out that AI right  now it's like just on a computer, you could maybe search just the web, but there's only so much  harm it could do.

44:01

But when it starts to go into robots and all these autonomous agents, that's  when it really starts, like physically becomes dangerous if we don't get this right.

44:11

Yeah, I think there's some nuance to that where if you look at how North Korea makes a  significant fraction of its economy revenue, it's from hacking crypto exchanges.

44:21

And if  you look at, there's this Ben Buchanan book called The Hacker in The State that shows Russia  did, it's almost like a live fire exercise where they just decided that they would shut down  one of Ukraine's bigger power plants and from software destroy physical components in the power  plant to make it harder to boot back up again.

44:47

And so I think people think of software as like,  oh, it couldn't be that dangerous, but millions of people were without power for multiple days after  that software attack.

44:53

I think there are real risks even when things are software only.

44:59

But I agree  that when there's lots of robots running around, it gets, the stakes get even higher.

45:06

And I guess  as a small push on this, Unitree is this Chinese company with these really amazing humanoid  robots that cost $20,000 each, and they can do amazing things.

45:20

They can do a standing back  flip and manipulate objects, and the real thing that's missing there is the intelligence.

45:26

And so  the hardware is there and it's just going to get cheaper.

45:31

And I think in the next couple of years,  it's like a pretty obvious question of whether the robot intelligence will make it viable soon.

45:38

How much time do we have, Ben?

45:38

What is your prediction of when this singularity hits  until superintelligence starts to take off? What's your prediction?

45:49

Yeah, I guess I mostly defer to the superforecasters here.

45:54

The AI 2027 report  is probably the best one right now.

45:54

Although ironically, their forecast is now 2028, and they  didn't want to change the name of the thing- The domain name, they already bought it.

46:09

They already had the SEO.

46:09

I think 50th percentile chance of hitting some kind of superintelligence  in just a small handful of years is probably reasonable.

46:22

And it does sound crazy, but this  is the exponential that we're on.

46:22

It's not like a forecast that's pulled out of thin air.

46:30

It's  based on a lot of just hard details of the science of how intelligence seems to have been improving,  the amount of low hanging fruit on model training, the scale ups of data centers and power around  the world.

46:44

I think it's probably a much more accurate forecast than people give it credit for.

46:51

I think if you had asked that same question 10 years ago, it would've been completely made up.

46:56

Just the error bars were so high and we didn't have scaling laws back then and we didn't have  techniques that seemed like they would get us there.

47:05

Times have changed, but I will repeat  what I said earlier, which is even if we have superintelligence, I think it will take some time  for its effects to be felt throughout society and the world.

47:16

And I think they'll be felt sooner and  faster in some parts of the world than others. I think Arthur C.

47:23

Clark said, the future is  already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

47:28

When we talk about this date of 2027,  2028, essentially it's when we start seeing superintelligence.

47:33

Is there a way you think  about what that... How do you define that?

47:37

Is it just all of a sudden AI's significantly  smarter than the average human?

47:37

Is there another way you think about what that moment is?

47:42

Yeah, I think this comes back to the Economic Turing Test and seeing it pass for some sufficient  number of jobs.

47:47

Another way you could look at it though is if the world rate of GDP increase  goes above 10% a year, then something really crazy must have happened.

48:02

I think we're at 3%  now.

48:02

And so to see a 3X increase in that would be really game changing.

48:08

And if you imagine more  than a 10% increase, it's very hard to even think about what that would mean from a individual story  standpoint.

48:15

If the amount of goods and services in the world is doubling every year, what does that  even mean for me as a person living in California, let alone somebody living in some other part  of the world that might be much worse off?

48:36

There's a lot of stuff here that's scary and I  don't know how to think about it exactly.

48:36

I'm hoping the answer to this is going to make me  feel better.

48:40

What are the odds that we align AI correctly and actually solve this problem,  the stuff you're very much working on?

48:49

It's a really hard question.

48:49

And there's really  wide error bars.

48:49

Anthropic has this blog post called Our Theory of Change or something like  that, and it describes three different worlds, which is how hard is it to align AI.

49:02

There's  a pessimistic world where it is basically impossible.

49:07

There's an optimistic world where  it's easy and it happens by default.

49:07

And then there's the world in between where our actions  are extremely pivotal.

49:13

And I like this framing because it makes it a lot more clear what to  actually do.

49:19

If we're in the pessimistic world, then our job is to prove that it is impossible  to align safe AI and to get the world to slow down.

49:30

Obviously that would be extremely hard.

49:30

But  I think we have some examples of coordination from nuclear non-proliferation and in general slowing  down nuclear progress.

49:36

And I think that's the Doomer world basically.

49:43

And as a company,  Anthropic doesn't have evidence that we're actually in that world yet, in fact, it seems like  our alignment techniques are working.

49:48

At least the prior on that is updating to be less likely.

49:56

In the optimistic world, we're basically done, and our main job is to accelerate progress and to  deliver the benefits to people.

50:02

But again, I think actually the evidence points against that world  as well where we've seen evidence in the wild of deceptive alignment, for example, where the  model will appear to be aligned but actually have some ulterior motive that it's trying to carry  out in our laboratory settings.

50:19

And so I think the world we're most likely in is this middle  where alignment research actually does really matter.

50:30

And if we just do sort of the economically  maximizing set of actions, then things will not go well.

50:39

Whether it's an X risk or just produces  bad outcomes, I think is a bigger question.

50:47

Taking it from that standpoint, I guess  to state a thing about forecasting, people who haven't studied forecasting are bad  at forecasting anything that's less than a 10% probability of happening.

51:03

And even those  that have, it's quite a difficult skill, especially when there are few reference classes to  lean on.

51:09

And in this case, I think there are very, very few reference classes for what an X risk kind  of technology might look like.

51:14

And so the way I think about it, I think my best granularity  of forecasts for could we have an X risk or extremely bad outcome from AI is somewhere between  0 and 10%.

51:29

But from a marginal impact standpoint, as I said, since nobody is working on this,  roughly speaking, I think it is extremely important to work on and that even if the world  is likely to be a good one, that we should do our absolute best to make sure that that's true. Wow. What fulfilling work.

51:49

For folks that are inspired with this?

51:55

I imagine you're hiring for  folks to help you with this.

51:55

Maybe just share that in case folks are like, what can I do here? Yes.

52:00

I think 80,000 hours is the best guidance on this for a really detailed look into what do  we need to make the field better?

52:06

But a common misconception I see is that in order to have  impact here, you have to be an AI researcher.

52:13

I personally actually don't do AI research anymore.

52:18

I work on product at Anthropic and product engineering, and we build things like Claude Code  and Model Context Protocol, and a lot of the other stuff that people use every day.

52:29

And that's  really important because without an economic engine for our company to work on, and without  being in people's hands all over the world, we won't have the mind policy influence and  revenue to fund our future safety research and have the kind of influence that we need to have.

52:49

If you work on product, if you work in finance, if you work in food, people here have to eat.

52:54

If  you're a chef, we need all kinds of people. Awesome.

53:02

Even if you're not working  directly on the AI safety team, you're having an impact on moving things in the  right direction.

53:07

By the way, X risk is short for existential risk.

53:12

In case folks haven't heard  that term.

53:12

I have a few random questions along these lines and then I want to zoom out again.

53:18

You mentioned this idea of AI being aligned using its model, like reinforcing itself.

53:24

You have  this term RLAIF.

53:24

Is that what that describes? Yeah.

53:32

RLAIF is reinforcement  learning from AI feedback.

53:39

People have heard of RLHF, reinforcement  learning with human feedback.

53:39

I don't think a lot of people have heard this.

53:43

Talk  about just the significance of this shift you guys have made in training your models.

53:48

Yeah, so RLAIF, constitutional AI is an example of this where there are no humans in the loop, and  yet the AI is sort of self-improving in ways that we want it to.

54:01

And another example of RLAIF is  if you have models writing code and other models commenting on various aspects of what that code  looks like of is it maintainable, is it correct, does it pass the linter? Things like that.

54:17

That  also could be included in RLAIF.

54:17

And the idea here is that if models can self-improve, then  it's a lot more scalable than finding a lot of humans.

54:32

Ultimately, people think about this as  probably going to hit a wall because if the model isn't good enough to see its own mistakes, then  how could it improve?

54:40

And also, if you read the AI 2027 story, there's a lot of risk of if the  model is in a box trying to improve itself, then it could go completely off the rails  and have these secret goals like resource accumulation and power seeking and resistance to  shut down that you really don't want in a very powerful model.

55:06

And we've actually seen that in  some of our experiments in laboratory settings.

55:12

How do you do recursive self-improvement and  make sure it's aligned at the same time?

55:12

I think that's the name of the game.

55:18

To me, it  just nets out to how do humans do that and how do human organizations do that?

55:25

Corporations  are probably the most scaled human agents today.

55:34

They have certain goals that they're trying to  reach, and they have certain guiding principles, they have some oversight in terms of  shareholders and stakeholders and board members.

55:45

How do you make corporations aligned  and able to sort of recursively self-improve?

55:52

And another model to look at is science, where  the purpose of science is to do things that have never been done before and push the frontier.

55:57

And to me, it all comes down to empiricism.

56:03

When people don't know what the truth is, they  come up with theories and then they design experiments to try them out.

56:06

And similarly, if we  can give models those same tools, then we could expect them to sort of improve recursively in an  environment and potentially become much better than humans could be just by banging their head  against reality or I guess metaphorical head.

56:26

I guess I don't expect there to be a wall in terms  of model's ability to improve themselves if we can give them access to the ability to be empirical.

56:32

And I guess Anthropic, deeply in its DNA is an empirical company.

56:41

We have a lot of physicists  like Jared, who's our chief research officer who I've worked with a lot, was a professor of Black  Hole Physics at Johns Hopkins, and I guess he technically still is, but on leave.

56:55

Yeah, it's  in our DNA and yeah, I guess that's the RLAIF.

57:04

Let me just follow this thread on, in terms  of bottleneck, this is kind of a tangent, but just what is the biggest bottleneck  today on model intelligence improvement?

57:12

The stupid answer is data centers and power chips.

57:12

I think if we had 10 times as many chips and had the data centers to power them, then maybe  we wouldn't go 10 times faster, but it would be a real significant speed boost.

57:28

It's actually very much scaling loss, just more compute.

57:32

Yeah, I think that's a big one.

57:32

And then the people really matter.

57:36

We have great researchers  and many of them have made really significant contributions to the science of how the models  improve.

57:43

And so it's like compute, algorithms, and data.

57:51

Those are the three ingredients in the  scaling laws.

57:51

And just to make that concrete, before we had transformers, we had LSTMs and we've  done scaling laws on what the exponent is on those two things.

58:03

And we found that for transformers,  the exponent is higher.

58:03

And making changes like that where as you increase scale, you also  increase your ability to squeeze out intelligence.

58:16

Those kinds of things are super impactful.

58:16

And so having more researchers who can do better science and find out how do we squeeze out  more gains is another one.

58:21

And then with the rise of reinforcement learning, the efficiency with  which these things run on chips also matters a lot.

58:32

We've seen in the industry a 10X decrease in  cost for a given amount of intelligence through a combination of algorithmic data and efficiency  improvements.

58:43

And if that continues, in three years we'll have 1,000 deck smarter models for  the same price.

58:50

Kind of hard to imagine, I forget where I heard this, but it's amazing  that so many innovations came together at the same time to allow for this sort of thing and  continue to progress where one thing isn't just slowing everything down like we're out of some  rare earth mineral or we just can't optimize reinforcement learning more.

59:11

It's amazing that we  continue to find improvements and there isn't one thing that's just slowing everything down.

59:16

Yeah, I think it really is just a combination of everything probably will hit a wall at some  point.

59:19

I guess in semiconductors.

59:19

My brother works in the semiconductor industry and he was telling  me that you can't actually shrink the size of the transistors anymore because the way semiconductors  work is you dope silicon with other elements and the doping process would result in either zero  or one atom of the doped elements inside a single fin because they're so, so, so tiny. Oh my God.

59:53

And that's just wild to think of, and yet Moore's  law somehow continues in some form.

59:53

And so yes, there are these theoretical physics  constraints that people are starting to run into and yet they're finding ways around it.

1:00:05

We've got to start using parallel universes for some of this stuff. I guess so.

1:00:12

Okay, I want to zoom out and talk about just  Ben, Ben as a human for a moment before we get to a very exciting lightning round.

1:00:16

I imagine  just kind of the burden of feeling responsible for safe superintelligence is a heavy one.

1:00:23

It feels like you're in a place where you can make a significant impact on the future of  safety and AI.

1:00:28

That's a lot of weight to carry.

1:00:34

How does that just impact you personally,  impact your life, how you see the world?

1:00:39

There's this book that I read in 2019 that really  informs how I think about sort of working with these very weighty topics called Replacing  Guilt by Nate Soares.

1:00:46

And he describes a lot of different techniques for kind of working  through this kind of thing.

1:00:52

And he's actually the executive director at MIRI, the Machine  Intelligence Research Institute, which is an AI safety tank that I worked at for a couple  of months actually.

1:01:03

And one of the things he talks about is this thing called resting in motion where  some people think that the default state is rest, but actually that was never in the state of  evolutionary adaptation.

1:01:18

I really doubt that that was true.

1:01:27

Where in nature, in the wilderness  being hunter-gatherers and it's really unlikely that we evolved to just be at leisure, probably  always have something to worry about of defending the tribe and finding enough food to survive  and taking care of the children, dealing- Spreading our genes.

1:01:46

And so I think about that as the busy state is the normal state and to try to  work at a sustainable pace that it's a marathon, not a sprint, that's one thing that helps.

1:01:57

And  then just being around like-minded people that also care.

1:02:04

It's not a thing that any of us can  do alone.

1:02:04

And Anthropic has incredible talent density.

1:02:12

One of the things I love the most about  our culture here is that it's very egoless.

1:02:12

People just want the right thing to happen and I think  that's another big reason that the mega offers from other companies tend to bounce off because  people just love being here and they care. That's amazing.

1:02:30

I don't know how you do it.

1:02:30

I'd be  extremely stressed.

1:02:30

I'm going to try this resting in motion strategy.

1:02:35

Okay, so you've been at  Anthropic for a long time.

1:02:35

From the very beginning I was reading there were 7 employees back in 2020.

1:02:41

Today there's over 1,000, I don't know what the latest number is, but I know it's over 1,000.

1:02:46

I've  heard also that you've done basically every job at Anthropic, you made big contributions to a lot  of the core products, the brand, the team hiring.

1:02:58

Let me just ask I guess what's most changed  over that period?

1:02:58

What is most different from the beginning days and which of those jobs that  you've had over the years have you most loved?

1:03:07

I probably had 15 different roles, honestly.

1:03:07

I was head of security for a bit.

1:03:07

I managed the Ops team when our president was on mat  leave, I was crawling around under tables, plugging in HDMI cords and doing pen testing on  our building.

1:03:18

And I started our product team from scratch and convinced the whole company that  we needed to have a product instead of just being a research company. Yeah, it's been a lot. All of it very fun.

1:03:29

I think my favorite role in that time has been when I started the labs team  about a year ago, whose fundamental goal was to do transfer from research to end user products  and experiences.

1:03:44

Because fundamentally I think the way that Anthropic can differentiate itself  and really win is to be on the cutting edge.

1:03:58

We have access to the latest, greatest stuff  that's happening and I think honestly through our safety research we have a big opportunity to  do things that no other company can safely do.

1:04:11

For example, with computer use, I think  that's going to be our huge opportunity basically to make it possible for an agent  to use all your credentials on your computer, there has to be a huge amount of trust and to me  we need to basically solve safety to make that happen. Safety and alignment.

1:04:25

I'm pretty bullish  on that kind of thing and I think we're going to see really cool stuff coming out soonish.

1:04:31

Yeah,  just leading that team has been so fun.

1:04:31

MCP came out of that team and Claude Code came out of that  team.

1:04:37

And the people who I hired are like combo, have been a founder and also have been at  big companies and seeing how things work at scale.

1:04:51

It's just been an incredible team to  work with and figure out the future with.

1:04:57

I want to hear more about this.

1:04:57

Team actually the  person that connected us, the reason we're doing this is a mutual friend colleague Raph Lee who  I used to work with at Airbnb now works on this team, leads a lot of this work and so he wanted  me to make sure I asked about this team because...

1:05:09

I didn't realize all these things came out  that team. Holy moly.

1:05:09

What else should people know about this team?

1:05:13

It used to be called  Labs, I think it's called Frontiers now. That's right. Yeah. Cool.

1:05:16

The idea here is this team works with the latest technologies  that you guys have built and explores what is possible.

1:05:24

Is that the general idea?

1:05:24

Yeah, and I guess I was part of Google's Area 120 and I've read about Bell Labs and  how to make these innovation teams work.

1:05:30

It's really hard to do right and I wouldn't  say that we've done everything right, but I think we've done some serious innovation on  the state-of-the-art from company design and Raph has been right at the center of that.

1:05:48

When I was  first fitting up the team, the first thing I did was hire a great manager and that was Raph.

1:05:52

And so  he's definitely been crucial in building the team and helping it operate well.

1:05:59

And we defined some  operating models like the journey of an idea from prototype to product and how should graduation  of products and projects work, how do teams do sprint models that are effective and make  sure that they're working on the right ambition level of thing.

1:06:17

That's been really exciting.

1:06:17

I guess concretely we think about skating to where the puck is going and what that looks  like is really understand the exponential.

1:06:32

There's this great study that METR has done that  Beth Barnes is the CEO of that organization and shows how long a time horizon of software  engineering task can be done and just really internalizing that of, okay, don't build for  today, build for six months from now, build for a year from now.

1:06:52

And the things that aren't  quite working that are working 20% of the time, will start working 100% of the time.

1:06:57

And I  think that's really what made Claude Code a success that we thought people are not going  to be locked to their IDEs forever.

1:07:02

People are not going to be auto completing.

1:07:07

People will  be doing everything that a software engineer needs to do and a terminal is a great place  to do that because a terminal can live in lots of places.

1:07:18

A terminal can live on your  local machine, it can live in GitHub actions, it can live on a remote machine in your cluster.

1:07:24

That's sort of the leverage point for us and that was a lot of the inspiration.

1:07:31

I think that's what the labs team tries to think about.

1:07:35

Are we AGI-pilled enough? What a fun place to be.

1:07:35

By the way, fun fact, Raph was my first manager at Airbnb when I joined.

1:07:41

I was an engineer and he was my first manager. It all worked out. Cool.