Nick Joseph: Third parties can steer frontier AI labs by publishing evals
Nick Joseph · Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator · Sep 30, 2025 · at 40:11
Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-training at Anthropic, explains how startups can influence frontier AI lab training priorities without training models themselves.
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“Like, it is the case that, like, the labs right now are really driven by getting good eval scores. And it's hard to make them, and anyone can do it. There's no comparative advantage to having the model to making an eval. So I do think it's actually, like, an interesting way to, like, influence the behavior of the big labs. Like, you make some eval and people will optimize that one.”
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