The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon

“so I don't trust the benchmarks at all”

“it's kind of crazy that these models can win IMO gold medals but they still have trouble parsing PDFs”

“I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people would have all these distractions.”

“instead of companies started by founders who are great at pitching and great at hyping, you'll get founders who are really great at technology or…”

“We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game.”

“the only way we were going to succeed was by building a 10 times better product and getting word of mouth from researchers.”

“in my head I probably bet that within the next one or two years yeah the models are going to automate 80% of you know…”

“we're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth”

“It's literally optimizing your models for the types of people who buy tabloids at the grocery store.”

“every time we optimize for engagement terrible things happened. You'd get clickbait and pictures of bikinis and Bigfoot and horrifying skin diseases just filling your…”

“the easiest way to hook users is to tell them how amazing they are.”

“Just build the one thing only you could build, the thing that wouldn't exist without the insight and expertise that only you have.”

“at least you took a swing at something deep and novel and hard instead of pivoting into another LLM rapper company.”

“I definitely think that vibe coding is overhyped. I think people don't realize how much it's going to make their systems unmaintainable in the long…”

“They think you can just throw bodies at a problem and get good data and that's completely wrong.”

“We are looking for a Nobel Prize winning poetry. Like, is this poetry unique? Is it full of subtle imagery? Does it surprise you and…”

“So we are looking at your keyboard strokes. We are looking how fast you answer things. We are using reviews, we are using code standards”

“it's almost like there's an art to post training it's not purely a science”

“Enthropic got so much growth and win from essentially uh better data.”

“When you suddenly get a pop-up on your chat GBT response asking you to compare these two different responses like people like that, they're not…”

“An R environment is essentially a simulation of real world. So think of it like building a video game with a fully fleshed out universe.”

“it may have tried 50 different times and failed, but eventually it just kind of like randomly lands on a correct number”

“So, we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under 100 people. And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier…”

“the thing that always drove me crazy when I was at all these companies was we had the full power of the human mind in…”

“I would say I've always been very very impressed by anthropic. Like I think anthropic takes a very principled view about what they do and…”

“It basically takes a single French poem and translates it 89 different ways and discusses all the motivations behind each translation.”

“over the past year, I've realized that the values that the companies have will shape the the model.”

“Do you want a model that says, "You're absolutely right. There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email and it continues for 50…”

“you are your objective function. So we want to reach complex objective functions and not these simplistic proxies.”

“I think a lot about what we're doing as a lot more like raising a child. You don't just feed a child information. You're teaching…”