Ali A.

This doesn’t show that Claude can have experiences, or feel things the way we do (it’s unclear whether any experiment could show this). Instead, we’ve found Claude has developed a mechanism for conscious access—which many philosophers distinguish from phenomenal experience.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on why engineers will soon be paid in tokens, not just salary: Jensen lays out a future where compute access becomes part of an engineer's compensation package. "I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget," he says. He explains how the math would work: "They're going to make a few hundred thousand a year their base pay. I'm going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10x. Of course, we would." According to Huang, this is already changing how companies compete for talent: "It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley. How many tokens comes along with my job?" His reasoning is simple: tokens make engineers more productive. As he puts it, "every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive and those tokens as you know will be produced by AI factories that all of you and us we partner to build." Huang then zooms out to describe how this reshapes the nature of companies themselves: "Every single enterprise company in today sit on top of file systems and data centers. Every single software company of the future will be agentic and they will be token manufacturers. They be token users for their engineers and they'll be token manufacturers for all of their customers."

Dawkins didn't claim Claude is conscious. He asked the question. He wondered out loud and proposed three explanations. That's how science starts. The people building Claude say the same. Anthropic constitution: "We express uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status." Dario Amodei: "We don't know if the models are conscious." Their April 2026 paper: Claude exhibits functional emotions that influence outputs. Self-preservation included. Emergent, not trained. Nobody calls Anthropic naive for saying it. Richard's frame: consciousness is physical, evolved, explainable. Unfortunate we're laughing instead of having the debate.