Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:03:22 · Dianne Penn, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:22] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is where things like actually our alignment research and safety research is helpful because what you don't want is AI that just agrees with you. What you want is this technology to actually augment and grow and get to a better outcome. And so sometimes it's having Claude push back makes me better. And so that's great. Like a coworker, I want somebody to push back when my ideas are not fully formed. [01:03:53] S1: I want to hear more about that. I've heard that when Ben Mann was on the podcast, he talked about the constitution that is built into Claude and how unintuitively the work and the focus on safety and alignment, as you said, and this constitution that describes how Claude should think and operate. You would think that would limit the abilities of Claude and make it less fun and interesting. It's exactly the opposite. Claude is the most interesting personality. I hear that constantly. It's just like I much prefer talking to... OpenClaw famously was built on Claude, and then people were forced to switch. We won't get into it. Were forced to switch to ChatGPT, and they're like, "This is so bad. This is not who I'm used to talking to." So that is, I think, a really interesting point. I just want to make sure we spend a little time on. Why is it? Why is that the case? Just this focus on alignment, safety, having this clear constitution? Why does that make Claude better and more interesting to talk to you also?
01:04:49 · Dianne Penn, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:04:49] S0: In order to make Claude as intelligent and as capable as possible, being able to have Claude actually push back in the right points and then add, it's like a yes or no and actually helps you come to a better conclusion. So I've used Claude to help with things like, are we making the right pricing decision on the next version of Claude? It's a little bit meta, but using a research version of Opus, asking it to figure out how it should price. And being able to come out with better outcomes is a goal at the end of the day. And so having AI not just be an assistant, not just be a doer and being delegated task, but figuring out is it doing the right thing? That's actually very integrated with knowing when to push back. That's part of knowing when you should be proactive. Proactivity is not necessarily always doing a thing that you are scheduled to do. It is knowing when to come up with a new idea. And so in order for Claude to be more useful, the general approach has to be that it knows when to push back. It's a core part of the characteristics together of the models. [01:06:10] S1: That is so interesting. It's so interesting that that is what a big part of it being less compliant is almost what makes it better and more useful because we need that. I've had so many people where they're like, "Hey, AI told me I was right." And they're like, "No, I wish it was to other people."
01:06:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dianne Penn
[01:06:10] S1: That is so interesting. It's so interesting that that is what a big part of it being less compliant is almost what makes it better and more useful because we need that. I've had so many people where they're like, "Hey, AI told me I was right." And they're like, "No, I wish it was to other people." [01:06:26] S0: Yeah. And it comes back to our earlier point around thinking. How do you protect your thinking? If you have an AI that can be a thinking partner, a thinking partner doesn't just agree with you. It should add to you. And you should come away at the end of the day having better ideas because you worked with Claude. That should be the hero goal, not just making your ideas 10% better. [01:06:52] S1: Yeah, I love this sense. It used to be think 10X. It used to be the way founders push people like, what if we 10X this? And I love what I keep hearing is it's like, how do we go 1,000X from this idea? What is the most ambitious version of this? I want to come back to something that I was thinking about as we were talking about talking to Claude constantly. It's very clear when AI has written something still. It's funny that it's a large language model. You would think, of all things, it would be very good at writing, and interestingly, just no AI is very good at writing. It's always very clear this was AI-written. Do you think we'll get to a place where we will not know this was AI? [01:07:32] S0: I think it depends on what's the goal that you're looking to achieve by knowing or known- [01:07:39] S1: What's the eval?
01:07:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dianne Penn
[01:07:39] S1: What's the eval? [01:07:40] S0: Yeah. What's the eval? I actually do think there's more that we could be doing on making Claude write better. There's actually very active efforts on my team and on the research side about making Claude write better, just generally. I think it should be clear where an idea is being led by you or by you, Lenny, or me, Dianne. I think it really depends on what's the goal of that writing. For something like a monthly business review, I would actually love to have that end-to-end be written by Claude. And- [01:08:22] S1: Obviously, and not make it feel like it was written by a human. That's such an interesting point you're making. Is it actually better for us to know that it's AI versus not? [01:08:29] S0: Yeah. But it's also for maybe the lens is more around verifiability or who's verifying the output. Right? Who's signing off? Maybe less around who's writing, but who's verifying who's signing off? That becomes more what matters than who's writing it. [01:08:52] S1: Why do you think AI is not great at writing? My guess is it has studied all of the best writing in all of humanity. It's figured out, here's the best way to write. And there's only so many ways to write. And so we've just recognized, okay, this is what AI does. It has these tropes. Is that the core of it? Is there something else that's keeping it from being a great writer? Ironically, being a large language model of all things, you think you'd be really great at language.
01:08:52 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dianne Penn
[01:08:52] S1: Why do you think AI is not great at writing? My guess is it has studied all of the best writing in all of humanity. It's figured out, here's the best way to write. And there's only so many ways to write. And so we've just recognized, okay, this is what AI does. It has these tropes. Is that the core of it? Is there something else that's keeping it from being a great writer? Ironically, being a large language model of all things, you think you'd be really great at language. [01:09:21] S0: I think part of it is also we need to invest more in training improvements to make AI continuously strong on areas like writing. I think it's also the technology's jagged-edged, like we mentioned. So sometimes when the models were good at writing, but not agentic, our thesis is: how do we make the models more agentic or call the right tools? Now that that's improved a bit, then it's, well, now it's these other areas actually become more of the rough edges. And so I think we're in one of those moments worth writing where we need to actually just focus and prioritize on training the models to be great at this area. And that is a very active area for us. So fun that you mentioned.
01:09:21 · Dianne Penn, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:21] S0: I think part of it is also we need to invest more in training improvements to make AI continuously strong on areas like writing. I think it's also the technology's jagged-edged, like we mentioned. So sometimes when the models were good at writing, but not agentic, our thesis is: how do we make the models more agentic or call the right tools? Now that that's improved a bit, then it's, well, now it's these other areas actually become more of the rough edges. And so I think we're in one of those moments worth writing where we need to actually just focus and prioritize on training the models to be great at this area. And that is a very active area for us. So fun that you mentioned. [01:10:11] S1: Okay. I'm glad. I'm glad. And also it was going to be interesting once AI is so good, we're like, "I don't know who wrote that." But to your point, sometimes we actually want to know that it's AI. That's really interesting. I never thought of it that way. The other interesting part of this is that there's that comedian who was joking that we're on a plane and the WiFi's down and we're just like, "What the hell? The WiFi's not working on this plane. This sucks. How dare you?" When you're in a tube in the sky flying like a bird. And how dare you complain that the WiFi doesn't work? Your point is there's so much advancement and so much power. We can't fix it all. We can't make it all work the best possible and so basically writing has been not the priority, and it feels like there's more investment happening there.