Jascha Achterberg

If I was a grad student today, I would: 1) Not write papers, 2) push my (agent-written) code to a public repo ~weekly, 3) maintain (via agents) a writeup.tex (manually verified) and a skill.md in the repo, and 4) work towards establishing skill usage as the new "citation" format.

Dario at MS TMT Conference today: On defense / DOW:"We really believe in defending America." Anthropic has been working with the national security community for 2 years. "We are the most lean forward." On AI acceleration:"We do not see hitting a wall. This year will have a radical acceleration that surprises everyone." Exponentials catch people off guard. "We are at the precipice of something incredible. We need to manage it the right way." On where markets are wrong:"It's already big and it will get 1 million times bigger." The underestimation of exponential growth is the key thing people need to understand. On revenue scale:Anthropic was at ~$100M run rate 2 years ago. Now at $19B run rate. On culture — Dario says he spends 40% of his time on it:"Anyone who is CEO of a growing firm needs to realize they are chief culture officer. My job is to make sure everyone is on same page and believes in what we are doing. That's the most important thing." He does a vision quest with the whole company every couple weeks. "I want them to hear it directly from me. If I tell the CTO, who tells the VP Eng, who tells the manager — that's too long of a game of telephone." "Politics and infighting are a cancer to companies as they grow." On talent retention vs Meta:"We lost 2 people to Meta. They lost several dozen. Normalized by size, they lost 10-20x more people vs us." Attributes this to unified culture generating "super linear returns — by working together vs working against each other." On code as the breakout use case:Code has "exceeded our high expectations." Why? Devs adopt fast, code is verifiable, and gains compound — you build software to build software. "Didn't realize it would go so fast even at traditional enterprises." Frustration is around regulated industries where legal/compliance slow things down. "That's how fast everything could be going if not for non-AI barriers." On Anthropic's own AI usage:Top internal use cases: 1) writing code, 2) the process around writing code (SWE), 3) managing servers and controlling clusters. "If we were paying ourselves for our usage, we'd be one of our largest customers." On Claude Code:"You can supervise an army of 100 Claudes. It's closely analogous to a management skill." The people who are best at it keep the big picture in their head. Higher return to finding people who can handle more complex tasks. On platform vs apps:"We are primarily a platform, but there are places where we have expertise to make something directly useful." Claude Code emerged as a tool they built for themselves — thousands of internal users before shipping it externally. "Code is a prelude for what we will see in everything else." On societal implications:"Human history — lots of muddling through. We found ourselves in this comedy of errors and figured it out eventually. It's happening so fast that we need to do better than that this time." The market will deliver positive benefits — "I see that as priced in." What's not priced in: the choices we make around externalities. Jobs, national security, ensuring the benefits reach everyone. On chips & compute:Anthropic uses multiple chip suppliers. "We find that actually using different chips is useful to us. Chips aren't just a speed number — we gain benefits from heterogeneity." Also standard business logic of having more than one supplier.