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?
00:23:37 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:23:37] S1: It's a very interesting way to frame this. And, you know, some of what you said seems to also reflect in the stuff we keep hearing, right? Like some of the other big labs, we keep hearing about like people leaving and stuff like that. We don't hear much of that Anthropic. Why is that? What is it about the culture, right, which makes people maybe just want to stay, keep building, right? And I'm sure there's a lot of lessons also from Thrive on building teams, building culture, which people here can benefit from.
00:24:08 · Rahul Patil
[00:24:08] S0: Good question. One, I won't take anything for granted. So the first thing that a founder always starts is culture. I know all of you as founders worry a lot about culture, but it is something important that's not a lip service that you live and breathe every day. It's extremely important. So my review process when I was trying to figure out, okay, you know, is this a good thing for both of us? I spent like almost two or three weeks with Sam. We spent three weeks thinking about all the reasons why I should be worried about coming to Anthropic, why I should like You know, what scares me about Anthro... Like, we spend most of the time... Like, most of you on your recruiting calls, you all spend time, Come and join us. Spend most of the time as like, Don't join us because, like, you know, things are going to be very hard. And we won't be free of criticism whether we succeed or not, because we are going to be very mission oriented. We believe these are the types of future we're building towards. So we spend actually, at the exact level, spend a lot of time telling, Please don't come here. Right? And so because unless you're culturally aligned and the mission is very strong, like you're aligned to the mission, it's not worth going. And so we spent so much time on that. We walked away from some of the best 10x developers because, you know, you have to not be in it for you, but you have to be in it for the company. So tomorrow, the company tells me to do something else. Go become an IC because that is the best way for me to contribute to the mission. Or if I feel that that is the best way, I will do it. No ego. 100% of our peers will do it. Like, the CPO just decided, I'm seeing this in emergent behavior. I will go be an IC in the labs, the Chief Product Officer. That is the level of humility that people have, and that is the level of mission alignment that they have. And yeah, there's something about living in the exponential where you're like, the mission about where we're going to go is very important. But I will never take anything for granted. It is a hard thing to preserve. Think about the best colleague you've ever had. What are they good at? They want to make you successful, and they're very transparent, and they don't just agree with you. They push back. They want you to be effective, not happy. Not just happy. Right?
00:26:29 · Rahul Patil, Ankit Chowdhary
Want you to be effective. And so the whole company is built that way. [00:26:34] S1: Yeah. I've heard great things about Tom, also one of the cofounders. Yeah. He was an early SPC member in SF I think ten years ago. So yeah I mean clearly I think what you're saying comes out first of all in everything and the way you show up and you know every time we met people in the team also I think they've been super collaborative. So I think you know kudos on the culture that's been built. Let's switch over to something you're super passionate about and you're working on right. You talked about scaling laws, talked about infra. How are you thinking about you know build out especially infra build out, right? Especially when it comes to regional data sovereignty, a lot of kind of talks around that. I know you and I have kind of offline some of this about GPUs and what your belief at least is, yeah, talk to us about how that is gonna shape up. [00:27:24] S0: Yeah. Look, there's two parts to the question. One is just the per country sovereignty things like that. And the second one is where are we headed overall. So one of the things I'll say, and this is again very important, when you're building, most people are building for the problems of today or yesterday, right? But where is the future? What are the types of regulations and stuff you actually need, right? And the the the... Did I say something? Very appropriate. That was perfect. Thanks. [00:28:07] S1: We planted
00:28:07 · Ankit Chowdhary, Rahul Patil
[00:28:07] S1: We planted [00:28:08] S0: him. Yeah. So so we are a big proponent of the right regulations. So we're one of the very few Silicon Valley capitalistic companies that's saying, please, we need more regulations. So one is we're working with all the governments to make sure that we're thinking about it correctly. In terms of the future, so just like when I went to Oracle Cloud, I had the opportunity to redesign the basic fundamentals of what it means to build a new cloud. That same thing is happening now. Once you're in the AI world, like what is the hardware, what is the networking, what is power, what is all the co designs that need to happen, So ultimately, applications and infrastructure and hardware and everything, all of it has to play in harmony for the end user to fully experience it. So there's a huge opportunity to redesign the whole thing, and I'm super excited about it. [00:29:03] S1: You also said that believe that scaling laws will hold.
00:29:03 · Ankit Chowdhary, Rahul Patil
[00:29:03] S1: You also said that believe that scaling laws will hold. [00:29:07] S0: Yes. Why so? So it has been holding extremely well for the last six, seven years, and we are seeing that there is no evidence for the next two years that... Like, we already see for the next two years it's still going to hold. And so far, we have no reason to believe it won't be holding for the foreseeable future. But everything that we are testing right now in our experiments say that the scaling laws are going to hold, which means that if you see the rate of model evolution, it's getting better. So, my advice to everyone is that anything that you think is badly viable right now is definitely viable in three to six months. Anything that seems a little crazy is probably viable in three to six months. Right? And so so please keep dreaming bigger because, like, that's where the models are going. [00:29:56] S1: You know, I wanna come back to that, but a related topic. Some... And I've heard this from a bunch of folks even at SPC. Something happened with Claude in December... From December onwards. The four dot five. Yeah. Yeah. And things just got, like, insanely better. Yeah. What happened? Like, what what what changed?