The Exchanges

Q And look, I know we're 15 minutes in, so I think we should probably take a minute to talk about the concrete things that you've improved in Claude between four and 4.5. Do you want to just give us briefly a little bit of a list of the things that get better with the new model?

A Yeah, I think the, the ones that I think are, are highlights, um, maybe I'll, I'll, I'll bucket into three. One is from a, uh, price performance, uh, perspective. So, 4.5 sine 4.5 basically outdoes Opus, our largest model in effectively every category, but does so while running faster and at a fifth the cost. So if you think about where we were in May at, you know, code with Claude, we were announcing, announcing Opus four. We now have a model that is better than that, and even its successor, Opus 4.1, but does so to fit the cost, which is very like, you know, opens up a whole new set of, of use cases for that kind of intelligence. That's, that's one on the price performance piece. Um, the second one is, um, on its ability, not just to, to code for, for longer, but just execute agentically for longer. We talked a little bit about agents, but, um, what we saw was, um, and actually I put a fun video of this, uh, on my X account, which is we asked every Claude from Claude one to Claude, you know, 4.5 to recreate Claude.ai. So like our flagship AI products. And, um, 4.5 was really the first one that was able to do it end to end and actually produce something of, you know, quality. It actually works. You can log in, you can use an API key, all of those things as well. Um, and so that ability to like execute agentically work for long time horizons. We had one customer had it work for…

AI assessment note: “I'll bucket into three. One is from a price performance perspective.”

Q Definitely. Well, we, there was a guy named Ben on X who said, I will mail Anthropik an original copy of my long form birth certificate if they will enable Fable for me again. I sound like those lunatics who were obsessed with Foro now. Will you take Ben's long form?

A I don't know that we'll take his long form, but it has been interesting. I mean, Fable was only available for a few days, but I've definitely, every time I've tweeted since then, they have not read whatever I was tweeting and they've mostly been like, Bring back Fable, which like an Instagram where you got rid of Gotham. Do you ever got them the filter? This is like, and then for the rest of like the next eight years, all I heard was bring back Gotham. So it struck an earth, but Fable will, uh, will come back before Gotham did. But yeah, it's, it's clearly the folks that have gotten to use it and started incorporating it. It's actually really interesting. Um, I've learned to not really trust day of or even week of model reactions. You don't really know until you've put it through its paces. And so like, I almost just, Completely block out the noise in the first couple of days of any new model release, because I don't know, everybody has maybe their like toy, like example thing that they like to do with a new model, but it's hard to actually put it through its paces until you've actually had real work done with it. And I think people were just starting to do that. And then, you know, we had to sort of pull back Fable. But I remember in December when we put out Opus four, six, it was like this interesting time where everybody went home for the holidays and a lot of people had tha…

AI assessment note: “I don't know that we'll take his long form, but it has been interesting.”

Q it wasn't for this guy. And it's a picture of Boris Terny, the person who created Claude Code. And so for companies that are going to build on top of Anthropik technology. You know, they're going to wonder, do I want to partner with Anthropik or is Anthropik going to go ahead and and build the product that I'm going to want to build potentially even after partnering with them?

A Yeah. I mean, we'll take the like agenda coding side and I think the broader sort of aspect of, of, you know, being both a platform and a product I think is really interesting. When we take on projects, it's the goal is often to sort of Push that area of the industry forward. So, um, you know, there were AI coding editors and some of them were really good and, you know, uh, but nobody was quite thinking about it in as sort of freeform a way as we got to think about it with cloud code. And now a lot more products have that flavor than I think would have otherwise. And so I think if wherever you can call me out on this, Alex, like if we're ever entering an industry where like all you're doing is the same thing everybody else is doing, but like you've got the anthropic brand, I feel like that's a bad use of our time and a bad use of our Either labs or product team time. Like if we're going in somewhere, it should hopefully be to say, all right, we think that the direction of travel is this way. We can build a product of that. And then, by the way, there's no world nor should there be a world where like all the products are in topic products. That would be a bad world. Right. So like that is hopefully either creating new space for companies or sort of showing the way where other products can incorporate.

AI assessment note: “hopefully either creating new space for companies or sort of showing the way”

Q it wasn't for this guy. And it's a picture of Boris Terny, the person who created Claude Code. And so for companies that are going to build on top of Anthropik technology. You know, they're going to wonder, do I want to partner with Anthropik or is Anthropik going to go ahead and and build the product that I'm going to want to build potentially even after partnering with them?

A Yeah. I mean, we'll take the like agenda coding side and I think the broader sort of aspect of, of, you know, being both a platform and a product I think is really interesting. When we take on projects, it's the goal is often to sort of Push that area of the industry forward. So, um, you know, there were AI coding editors and some of them were really good and, you know, uh, but nobody was quite thinking about it in as sort of freeform a way as we got to think about it with cloud code. And now a lot more products have that flavor than I think would have otherwise. And so I think if wherever you can call me out on this, Alex, like if we're ever entering an industry where like all you're doing is the same thing everybody else is doing, but like you've got the anthropic brand, I feel like that's a bad use of our time and a bad use of our Either labs or product team time. Like if we're going in somewhere, it should hopefully be to say, all right, we think that the direction of travel is this way. We can build a product of that. And then, by the way, there's no world nor should there be a world where like all the products are in topic products. I'll be a bad world, right? So like that is hopefully either creating new space for companies or sort of showing the way where other products can incorporate.

AI assessment note: “creating new space for companies or sort of showing the way”

Q Instagram, head of product at Anthropic. Kevin Wheel, uh, is running a former head of Instagram, head of Instagram product as well, I think, uh, is, is running product at OpenAI. Fiji Simo, who came from Facebook, is running consumer applications at OpenAI. I, I mean, I could go on. Um, what does, what does building these products have in common with building social media and how does it differ?

A I think there's, there's maybe the, you know, abstracted from the actual product itself, like what does it take to build good product? And I think that, um, I think it's, it's less that there's a lot of social media, um, sort of oriented folks that have now moved into AI. It's more that I think a lot of the best product people were focused on that, you know, even four years ago, you know, pre-chat GPT, uh, you know, pre the emergence of a lot of these LLMs. Um, so I think it's sort of like the most recent place that concentrated, I find that that often happens, like the concentration of talent among a particular, uh, discipline. And I think that was, that was social media beforehand. So that's partly one of them. And there it's, you know, um, all of the pieces around understanding, uh, what your data is telling you, but also having the intuition around like what bets you want to place in terms of where you want to move into next, how you assemble a great product team, how does product engineering and design And marketing work well together. All these different, you know, sort of aspects of that. So that there's that one. And then I think there's the, the, the separate question of, you know, within social media, like what are the similarities and differences? Um, with Claude, it feels quite different in that, you know, we have more of a business audience, like plenty of people u…

AI assessment note: “within social media, like what are the similarities and differences? Um, with Claude, it feels”

Q I want to talk to you about, about community briefly. Um, where do you look to, Find, I guess, a community of, of users and get your feedback. Um, and how important is Reddit for you? Because I've seen so much of the activity in the AI space move on to Reddit. And I'm curious, are, are you reading like r slash singularity or how deep into it are you?

A Um, that's a great question. So it's interesting being, um, I would say that there's like sort of somewhat overlapping, but distinct communities that we look at. One is like being a platform. We have, um, like a strong kind of customer base that often has a very Sort of clear eyed perspective about where the models could continue to improve or what we could be doing better as a platform. And so, um, this is very different than my time at Instagram where, you know, there were people that we talked to a bunch about how they're using Instagram, but we didn't have this like more permanent notion of like an advisory board that we have here at Anthropic. And we just brought in a couple of months ago, Paul Smith is our new chief commercial officer. And he's brought also this sort of community of more enterprise folks as well that we've been talking to. So that's one kind of Big Delta, which is, uh, like more stable, uh, sort of set of people than community that we're, we're talking to. So that's one. Um, we actually have a phenomenal user experience research team, and that's a place where we end up being able to stay connected to how, um, more of the power users that I think of as like our core demographic for something like cloud.ai, uh, are using the product. I love it. Like every month we do a product all hands. And my favorite chunk of that product all hands is basically The UXR t…

AI assessment note: “there's like sort of somewhat overlapping, but distinct communities that we look at”