Anthropic's Joseph: Compute matters far more than pre-training objective details
Nick Joseph · Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator · Sep 30, 2025 · at 6:57
Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-training at Anthropic, discusses why autoregressive modeling succeeded over alternative pre-training objectives with Y Combinator's Ankit Gupta.
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“I think that, like, the one sort of general intuition I have is, like, compute is the thing that matters. So, like, I think if you throw enough compute at any of these objectives, you're gonna get something that's probably pretty good, and can kind of be fine tuned to other things, and it's surprising how little these details matter compared to throwing more compute at the problem.”
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