00:15:34 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:15:34] S1: I'm gonna just pick on that because the reason I think a lot of people talk about pain and despair is because startups are hard. Yes. You know? Building is very hard. And and more often than not, you know, breaks, like things go wrong, stuff happens that you can't control. I'm sure you've had those kind of moments, you know, with your team. How do you, at that moment, still bring in that culture of Prate of Success?
00:15:59 · Rahul Patil
[00:15:59] S0: So, one, we're all scientists, right? Before you start your day, before you start an experiment, you should have a hypothesis. You know, what do you expect out of this? And what is the probability that what you expect is not going to happen? And when something doesn't work the way you think it worked, you will be like, cool. Scientifically, was this within the probability? Was this luck? Was you know, was this, I bad? Was I good? You have to think about it. So my grandparents were farmers in North Karnataka, okay? And so I had a lot of the farming mindset. So it takes six months to grow a crop. But today, I have to put the seeds. Tomorrow, like, have to put water. And then after that, I have to put, like, cow dung on it. Trying to explain to somebody for the first time all of this is required, but in six months, you'll see amazing crops. But in the six months, weather patterns can happen. You may have 10x more output. You can have 10x fewer output. But does it change what I do today? So that mindset of being scientific is like, do I turn on my team because on the sixth month something bad happened? But I know repeatably through experience that these are the steps that gets us there. This is my scientific hypothesis, and I will evaluate whether, like, you know, I was within luck that this happened. And this is for success as well. Did I get lucky or was I good? I ask myself every day, was I lucky or was I good? Was I unlucky or was I bad? These are things that help me take control of the situation. So being scientific and having that mindset is super crucial. And then knowing that your team is also scientific and not to attach personal success or personal failure based on a single outcome. That is a very important mindset to build in the hyper growth, especially as startups.
00:17:54 · Ankit Chowdhary, Rahul Patil
[00:17:54] S1: I think you're good. You're not just lucky. [00:17:57] S0: All too lucky. [00:17:58] S1: All too lucky. Talk to me about Anthropic. You know, think you said a few things which seemed to kind of answer this question, but what made you make the big move? You said it's one of the most important works you want to do in your life today. Why? You know, what is it about this that really drew you? Yeah. So I was on the other end of using AI like all of you. ChatGPT blew our imagination in some ways. There was a moment.
00:18:26 · Rahul Patil
[00:18:26] S0: And then, know, I think AlphaGo had its moment. And then I was like, there is something about this that is growing on me. One, it's growing the fastest I've ever seen. Like, I've never seen a technology improve this quickly and also capture so much imagination. Second is that every three months, it would unlock something new I could be doing. So then I go, Okay, that is really awesome. What is this? And so I spent a lot of time learning about it. I did something called engineerication. So you take a vacation, and you become an engineer at heart again. And so I wanted to ship something in my org. I wanted to ship a bug in five days, and that was what I gave myself. Ended up shipping five things in five days. And I'm like, Wow, this AI thing is really, really good. And so something started to turn in my head. And then I'm like, Okay, this is going to be the most monumental thing that's going to last for about one hundred years. I've seen many tech revolutions. This feels unlike pretty much anything else. Then I'm like, I want to be part of it. Like, I'm a plumber. The infrastructure in me. It's like, I want to be in the guts of this. I want to be in the core of what makes this happen. There was a second part to this, which is there's enormous impact. Whether this thing succeeds or fails, like AI as a concept, there's enormous impact at the society level. And I wanted to be part of something that also thought about it very responsibly. And the company that I found to be like the most integral at heart, I met the co founders, like extremely humble people. They're so brilliant, but they're so humble. And the entire organization was like that. I'm like, what is this? Like, everyone is like just so mission oriented and so selfless about everything that they do and very consistent every action that they took. So even now, I make decisions every day. I was on a very tough call just before this. It's like, hey, do we slow down research because we think we need to go do more safety work right now. It doesn't matter what as I said, I don't want to spend time thinking about competition. I want to think about, Are we better than yesterday? And so this entire week, I've been thinking a lot about safety, as an example. So this company lives up to that value and mission.
00:20:46 · Rahul Patil, Ankit Chowdhary
So that drew me, and I can't think of a better calling and a better place, better way for me to be spending my time right now. [00:20:54] S1: You made a very interesting point because SAM is now, I think, moving on to the science side of things. And there will be this push and pull between science and engineering or safety, right, where you will have to decide at every given point in time what do we prioritize. So how will you and how does Anthropic look at that kind of value clash?
00:21:15 · Rahul Patil
[00:21:15] S0: Great. No. First of all, Sam, I absolutely love that guy. He is brilliant. Like, he's very soft spoken, absolutely brilliant. He's like part of the reason why Anthropic is very, very successful. There's so much to learn from him every day. And then the course threads that I have, like the infrastructure side, but also on the product side and so on. And so we're two in a box in many ways. And absolutely, every time we hang out... So I spent the most time with Sam before joining Anthropic, actually. And so it's just like thinking about what is the right way for us to be the most effective. So I don't know exactly where the line gets drawn between research and science and engineering and product and all of that stuff. So we are very much like we're tightly aligned at the mission. We're loosely coupled at the execution. And the whole organization is like that. So as much as we want to think that somehow us execs are doing a bunch of amazing work, most of the important work at Anthropic is happening at the front line. That is because they are the closest to the emergent behaviors of AI. Most of the products are being dreamt of by the people on the ground. Most are engineers, yes. But some of the products, the finance plugin and all of that stuff, came from the finance hub. So we, as a culture, have inverted. It's like whoever is closest to the work and understanding how AI is emerging and how we can help them, you are the ones helping us build the product and edge and so on. And there's a very tight feedback loop across science, edge, product, PM, finance, and everything else. We spend most of our time we're a research lab at heart finding the wonder. Like, we're in pursuit of wonder. It's like, what makes us wonder about the technology? We spend all our time. It doesn't matter what your discipline is. We spend most of our time searching for that wonder. We find it, we tell everyone about it, and then we all swarm and say, What else can we do with it? Right? And so that is how mostly we operate. It's more like, What is the most important thing for the mission? What do our customers want? How can we get it as fast as possible?