Dianne Penn, Head of Product for AI Research and Labs at Anthropic, contrasts the maturity of AI progress in software engineering against scientific domains.
“I think, you know, software engineering has been really transformed by AI. I think there's areas like biology, life sciences. These are all things that we're just kind of at like the foot of the exponential on. Like, maybe software engineering were on the exponential, on some of these area, other areas were not quite there yet.”
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More from Dianne Penn
Insight
Penn: Scaling loss is smooth, but AI capabilities emerge discontinuously
“As you add in more compute and data, what's called loss, aka the loss from next token prediction goes down. And so it's a very smooth linear curve of, like, the models get more intelligent as you scale them up. What's actually also interesting in that paper is…”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 17:53Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
Insight
Penn: Evals Have Replaced Traditional PRDs in AI Product Management
“We actually have a saying on the team of evals are the new PRDs. Cause in order to deliver that user value it's not that exact artifact that people used to write in the last like one to two decades. It's a new way of working.”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 41:36Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
Insight
Penn: Optimizing Claude 3 Opus for long-form coding drove Anthropic's early differentiation
“People are starting to use code these models, not just for code, not just like code autocomplete, but actually writing long form code. And it's that an opportunity for us to train, you know, Opus three to be better at. And it ended up being a relatively smalle…”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 11:33Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
What-if
Penn: Opus 4.5 and Claude Code depended on each other for breakout success
“I think Opus Four Five wouldn't have had that moment without a product like Cloud Code. And Cloud Code, I think, wouldn't have had that type of adoption accelerated without Opus Four Five.”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 13:38Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
Opinion
Penn: Anthropic's Opus and Fable models still have product overhang
“I think there's like product overhang and user overhang, like to maybe put it in our PM language, even on today's models. And I think there's like a lot that we could be exploring on like our current opuses and definitely with like Fable, for example”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 19:28Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
Opinion
Penn: Highly capable AI models increase the need for user-centric PMs
“I think fundamentally, you didn't ask me this, but there is this question in the community of, do we still need PMs when the models are still capable, when engineers are leaning in I think the role of people who are user centric, who go into the details of und…”
Dianne PennJul 26, 2026▶ 1:22:59Why AI is going vertical (again) | Dianne Penn (Anthropic)
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