We are thrilled to have our next speaker with us. Daniela is the president and co-founder of Anthropic, which recently just launched the really impressive quad 3 model. Please welcome Daniela in conversation. Thank you so much for being here, Daniela. You're welcome. Yes, you do. Take this. Oh, that's so nice of you. Thank you. I think everybody in the audience is familiar with Anthropic as probably a customer of yours. But can you just do a quick refresher for everyone in the audience about Anthropic, the company, what is your mission, what's the future you imagine, and how are you building towards that future? Sure thing. So first of all, thanks so much for having me. Great to be with all of you today. So I'm Daniela. I am a co-founder and president at Anthropic. We are a generative AI company that is really working to build powerful transformative generative AI tools that really have humans at the center of them. So we have a huge focus on building this tech in a way that is trustworthy and reliable. And we've been around for just about three years, a little over three years. And in that time, have been able to advance the state of the art across generative AI on a number of dimensions. Wonderful.
And what are the unique approaches that you're taking now that the foundation model space is getting very crowded? What are the things that make you uniquely anthropic? I love that question. So first of all, I would say there's a few different ways that I kind of like think about or interpret that question. One is really how do we kind of differentiate ourselves at the model level, right? What do we do when we're training the models or how do we want the models to sort of have people feel when they use them? And here what I would say is we really, again, thinking about this kind of commitment to trustworthiness, reliability of our models, we implement a number of different sort of technical safety approaches to help make the models really more aligned with what humans want them to be doing. So we pioneered a technique called constitutional AI, which really enables the models to incorporate documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Apple Terms of Service to really make it more aligned with values of the sort of human race. From a sort of business perspective, we really have tried to make a quad as approachable as possible in particular for enterprise businesses. So large businesses in particular, I think, have really resonated with our approach because they also value models that are helpful and honest and harmless, right? In general, very large enterprise businesses tend to be concerned about models that will hallucinate or say something very, very offensive.
Wonderful. Let's talk about use cases. I think one of the major questions people in the audience have today is where companies are finding the most product market fit. And I think you have a unique vantage point on that from anthropic. What are the use cases that you see that are already reaching real product market fit? And what are the use cases that you think are on the come that they're about to reach product market fit? So I think it varies a little bit, first of all, just kind of depending on industry. So there's kind of some industries that I think are kind of quite advanced in generative AI. Unsurprisingly, the technology industry has been an early adopter. That's often how it goes. But I think something that has sort of been interesting for us to see is we just released this new sort of suite of models, the Claude 3, we call it the model family. And so the kind of biggest model, Claude 3 Opus is the kind of state of the art. We sort of joke it's like the Rolls Royce of the models. It's incredibly capable and powerful. And really what we've seen is not everybody needs the kind of top tier state of the art model for all of their use cases. But the times when you do need it is when you need a model that is just incredibly intelligent, capable and powerful. So things like if you're doing scientific research or you're trying to have a model write very complex code for you at a fast pace or do complex macroeconomic policy analysis, Claude 3 Opus is a great fit for that. Claude 3 Haiku, which is the smallest model, this is the Ducati, it's sort of the racing motorcycle is amazing for things like customer support. So really what we've seen in the industry is that speed and cost are very important for anything that kind of requires real time response rates. And then Claude 3 Sonnet, which is sort of that middle model, a lot of enterprise businesses are using for things like day to day retrieval, summary of information. If they have unstructured data that they need to pull together and analyze. And so I would say it varies by industry, but it also sort of varies by use case and just how much ability customers have to kind of choose between what's available for them. Wonderful.
Sure. One or two of your favorite use cases that people have built on anthropic? Yeah, for sure. I would say I'm like a do-go-to-red heart. So one of my favorite use cases is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute uses Claude to help with genetic analysis. So looking for sort of cancer markers. I think there's also like much more kind of a sort of boring application, but there's a lot of kind of financial services firms like Bridgewater and Jane Street that are really using Claude to help them analyze financial information in real time. I think I like both of those because they really just sort of represent such a wide spectrum. I think it illustrates how truly general purpose these models are. It's a model that can help you to literally try and cure cancer faster, but also to do sort of the day to day bread and butter of illegal services or financial services firms work.
Wonderful. Are you seeing more success in your customer's finding product market fit from startups or from enterprises right now? So I would say for anthropic in particular, we have really focused on kind of the enterprise use case. And again, this is really because we have felt such a resonance in approach for businesses that are interested in building in ways that are trustworthy and reliable, right? All of the things we've sort of been talking about. That being said, I think there's a ton of innovation that is always happening in the startup space. And so something that I think is really interesting to watch is sometimes we'll have kind of a startup sort of prototype something and we'll see like, wow, that's, you know, that's a really fascinating use case. Like we wouldn't have thought that you could use Claude that way. And then that will become something that like enterprise businesses sort of like later learn about because they know someone who works at that startup or they've kind of seen it in production.
So my sense is for us personally, we're much more sort of building for and pivoted towards the enterprise. But I think there's really a wide, wide ecosystem of development that that's happening in the business space. On the spectrum from prototyping to, you know, experimentation all the way to production, where do you think most of your customers are today on the journey? Yeah. I think on the kind of, I think for this, I'll like talk about enterprise and then startups because they're a little bit different. I think for enterprises, it actually ranges like pretty, pretty widely. There's some businesses that I would even say have multiple kind of production use cases, right? Where they might be using Claude internally to, you know, analyze health records or help doctors or nurses, you know, analyze notes and save themselves administrative time so they can be with patients more. But if they're a big company, they might also be using it for a chat interface, right? So depending on the business use case, sometimes they have, you know, multiple use cases in production. But it's a little spiky, right? There might be times where one of those, one of those use cases is like quite far along. They've already been in production for like a year. They really like know the question, right? They come to us and they're like, we really, really want to optimize like this metric or we really care about price or we really care about latency. And then there's businesses all the way on the other end of the spectrum who come to us and are like, I've been hearing about generative AI like from my board. You help us understand, is there a solution here, right? And so I think it does vary a lot, but I will say industries, I have personally been surprised that some industries that are not necessarily historically known for being early adopters, like insurance companies or financial services or healthcare, I think are actually great candidates for incorporating this technology and many of them have.
Wonderful. Let's move on to cloud three and research. Maybe you just launched cloud three. Maybe tell us a little bit about what went into it and how the reception has been so far.
So yes, we just, just a couple of weeks ago launched cloud three. As I mentioned, it's this sort of model family, right? So there's different models kind of available for different use cases, again, for businesses. And really, I think what has been so interesting is we've gotten great, you know, positive feedback about cloud. Of course, there's always things that we're improving and wanting to do better. But some, something that I have found, you know, really just interesting is customers have sort of simultaneously commented on how kind of capable and powerful the models are, right? They're the most intelligent state of the art models available on the market today.
But people have also commented, hey, it's way harder to jailbreak these or the hallucination rates have kind of gone down a lot. And so there has been this kind of dual language around both capability and safety. And then the last piece, which I always find really interesting is many customers have told us part of the appeal of cloud is that cloud feels more human. And so when people kind of interact with or talk to cloud, we've sometimes heard folks say it really feels like talking to, you know, a trusted person versus talking to a robot that was kind of trained to sound like a human.
I love that. And I think everyone here has seen all the eval charts. I think cloud really, one of the areas where it really spikes is in coding, where I think the performance is just off the charts right now. Maybe can you tell us a little bit about how you made the model so good at coding in particular and then how you see the role, how you see AI software engineering playing out and anthropics role in it?
So I think something that is interesting that I've like learned from my research colleagues so I don't sort of pretend to be an expert on this is as the models just become generally more performative, they kind of like get better at everything. And so I think much of the same training techniques that we used to improve the models, you know, accuracy and reading comprehension and general reasoning were also used to improve its ability to code. And I think that's something that, again, is kind of a fundamental interesting sort of research thing, which is like rising boat sort of lifts all tides.
That being said, there's a lot of variety in these models. And something I've always found interesting is certain models, like people are like, I always use this model for like task X right at the consumer level. And other times folks will say this model like you absolutely have to use for task Y. So I think there is a little bit of almost pull through personality that happens with these kind of regardless of the improvements, kind of a useful caveat.
In terms of what are people doing in the sort of software engineering space and kind of what is the role of these models, I'm not a programmer. So I feel like I probably can't opine on this as well as others. But much of what we have heard from our customers is that Claude is a great tool in helping people who write code. Claude cannot replace a human engineer yet, but it can be a great kind of co-pilot in helping. Love that.
So we have a philosophical research question. How do you think about the role of transparency in AI research, especially as it seems like the AI field has become more and more closed? And Thorpek has always felt very strongly about publishing a large portion of our research. So we don't publish everything, but we have published something like two dozen papers. The vast majority of them are actually technical safety or policy research papers.
The reason that we choose to publish those are as a public benefit corporation, we really view our job as helping to raise the watermark really across the industry in areas like safety. So we have a team that focuses on something called mechanistic interpretability, which is essentially the art of trying to figure out what is happening inside the black box that is these neural networks. And it's a very kind of emerging field of research. There's like two or three teams in the entire world that work on it.
And we really feel like there's a lot of opportunity when kind of sharing that more broadly with the scientific community to just increase understanding around topics like that, particularly in sort of the elements of safety. So we've shared all of these research papers. And then additionally, we do a lot of work in kind of the policy sphere and try and publish research results. Papers are red teaming results as well. Thank you.
One of the big themes of today's event is trying to think about what's next. So I was hoping to ask from your vantage point, what are the biggest challenges that you see your customers facing or your researchers thinking about when they're trying to build with LLMs? Like where are they hitting a wall? And how is anthropic working to address some of those problems?
So I think there's a few kind of classes of ways that these models are still sort of, they're still not perfect, right? I think one big one is there are just fundamental kind of challenges to how these models are developed and trained and used.
So the kind of prototypical one that's talked about is this hallucination problem, right? I'm sure everyone in the room knows this, but models are just trained to predict the next word. And so sometimes they don't know the right answer. And so they just make something up.
And we have made a huge amount of progress as an industry in reducing hallucination rates from like the GPT-2 era. But they're still not perfect. I'm not entirely sure what this sort of decrease curve will look like for hallucination rate, right? We keep getting better at it. I'm not sure if we'll ever be able to get models to zero. That is a fundamental challenge for businesses, right?
If your model is going to even very occasionally hallucinate for some of the highest stakes decisions, you probably wouldn't choose to use a model alone, right? You would say, hey, we need a human in the loop.
And I do think something that's kind of very interesting is there's a really small set of cases today where LLMs alone can do the majority of the task, right? Like their best, again, I think in tandem with a human for the majority of kind of use cases.
I also think there's just sort of this interesting. It almost feels a little more philosophical, which is just what are humans actually comfortable with giving to models, right? I think part of the sort of human in the loop story is also about helping, you know, businesses and industries and individuals feel more comfortable with an AI tool making fundamental decisions.
Thank you for sharing that. A few of the folks here spoke about planning and reasoning. Is that something you all are thinking about at Enthropic? And could you share a few words on that? Yeah, definitely.
So that can obviously mean a few things. So I think on the kind of dimension of like, how do you get these models to sort of like execute sort of multi-step instructions, right? I'm assuming that's kind of what planning means.
这可能有几种意思。我认为在这种维度上,如何让这些模型执行多步指令,是一种规划的意思。
You know, it's really interesting. There's a lot of research and kind of work that has gone into this sort of concept of like agents, right? Like how do you give the models the ability to like take control of something and like, you know, execute multiple actions in a row and like, can they plan, right? Can they sort of think through like a set of steps?
I do think that Claude 3 sort of represented for us elite between kind of the last generation of models in its sort of ability to do that. But I actually think that level of kind of agentic behavior is still really hard. Like I think the models cannot quite do that reliably yet.
Again, this feels like such a sort of fundamental research question that I don't know how long it will be until that's not the case. But I don't think it's the sort of, you know, the dream of like, can I just ask Claude to book my flight for me, like, please go book my reservation hotel, just plan my vacation.
I don't actually think that that's like immediately around the corner. I think there's still some research work and engineering work that needs to go into making that possible. Yep. Yep. Okay.
我并不认为这个就在眼前。我认为仍然需要进行一些研究和工程工作才能使这成为可能。是的。是的。好的。
So the future is coming. The future is coming quickly. It's also coming, Choppily. It's a little unclear exactly which parts of it are going to come where. Okay. Very cool.
Can we talk about AI safety for a moment and Thropic really made a name for itself on AI safety. And I think you were the first major research institution to publish your responsible scaling policies.
How do you balance innovation and accountability and how would you encourage other companies and make a system to do that as well? So something that we kind of get asked a lot is, you know, how do you all plan to compete if you're, you know, so committed to safety?
And something that I think has been, you know, really interesting is many fundamental safety challenges are actually business challenges. And rather than sort of thinking of these two as something that, you know, two sides that are kind of opposed to each other, I actually think the past kind of mainline success in generative AI development runs through many of the safety topics we've been talking about, right?
Most businesses don't want models that are going to like spout harmful garbage, right? Like that's just not a useful product. The same thing is through like if the model refuses to answer your questions, if it's, if it's dishonest, right? If it makes things up, those are sort of fundamental business challenges in addition to kind of technical safety challenges.
I also think something we have really aimed to do as a business is sort of take the responsibility of developing this very powerful technology quite seriously, right? We sort of have the benefit of being able to look back on several decades of social media and say like, wow, much of what social media did for the world was incredibly positive. And there were these externalities that nobody predicted that it created, which I think are sort of now widely believed to be quite negative for people. So I think anthropic has always aimed to say, what if we could try and sort of build this technology in a way that better anticipates what some of those risks are and helps to prevent them? And the responsible scaling policy is basically our first attempt to do that, right? It might not be perfect. There could be things about it that are sort of laughably wrong later. But really what we've said are, what are the dimensions on which something can go wrong here, right?
And RCO, my brother, Dario testified to Congress about the potential risks for gender of AI to develop things like chemical and biological weapons. And what we've said is we actually have to do proactive work to ensure that these models are not able to do that. And the responsible scaling pact is really just a way of sort of saying, hey, we're committing to doing that work. Thank you for sharing that. Let's see. Any questions from the audience? Yes. Thanks so much. One of the things that I think was really awesome about the Claude Opus release was that it was really strong, specific performance in a few domains of interest. And so I was wondering if you could talk more about kind of like technically how you view the importance of research versus compute versus data for specific domain outperformance and what the roadmap looks like for where Claude will continue to get better. Yeah. That's a great question.
I think my real answer is that I think you're probably giving the industry more credit than it deserves for having some like perfectly sort of planned structure between like, we'll sort of research area X and like increased compute will improve Y. I think there's a way in which training these large models is more a process of discovery by our researchers than kind of intentional deliberate decisions to like improve particular areas to kind of go back to that like rising tide lifts all boats sort of analogy. Making the models just generally more performative tends to just make everything better sort of across the board.
That being said, there is sort of particular targeted work that we did do in some sub areas with constitutional AI and reinforcement learning from human feedback where we just saw that performance wasn't quite as good. But it's actually a smaller fraction than you might think compared to just generally improving the models and making them better. It's a great question. Yes, Sam. I've been loving playing with Claude III. Claude Opus, it's fantastic. And I totally agree it feels way more human to talk to you. One thing I've noticed that it almost feels like a specific human like it has a personality.
And I'm kind of curious as you guys continue to work in this domain and make other models, how you see the boundary of kind of like personality development. If people are kind of trying to create specific characters, is there kind of a stance you guys are taking from the constitutional perspective of the boundaries of how Claude can actually play a character other than itself? So something that is really, I think unusual about kind of Claude is just how like seriously Claude will take feedback about its tone. If you're like Claude, you are, this is too wordy. Like please just be very factual and talk to me like I have a financial analyst, try it out.
Claude will absolutely sort of adjust its style to be more kind of in that sort of mil you or hey, I'm writing a creative writing story, like please use very flowery language or talk to me like you're angry at me or talk to me like you're sort of you know friendly or whatever. I think there's sort of an interesting other thing you're asking though, which is like what is the default mode that we should be setting these models kind of personalities to be. And I don't think we've sort of landed on kind of the perfect spot. But really what we were aiming for was like what is a slightly wiser, better version of us kind of how would they react to questions, right? Like some humility, I'm sorry I missed that. Thanks so much for the feedback, like I'll try to do that better.
I think there's kind of an interesting fundamental question though, which is as the kind of marketplace evolves, do people want like particular types of kind of chat bots or chat interfaces to sort of treat them differently, right? Like you might want to sort of coax a particular form of customer service bot to be like particularly obsequious or I don't know, there are just kind of other potential use cases. My guess is that's probably going to end up being the province of like startups that are built on top of tools like Claude. And I think our stance might vary a little bit there, but in general we've tried to start from a like friendly humble base and then let people tweak them as they go within boundaries of course.
Hey, so the developer experience on Claude and the new generation of Claude 3 models is markedly different than other LLM providers, especially the use of XML as like a prompt template format. How are you thinking about introducing switching costs here and especially in the long term, do you want it to be an open ecosystem where it's very easy to switch between anthropic and your various competitors or are you thinking about making more of a closed ecosystem where I'm working directly with anthropic for all of my model needs?
So I think maybe the best way to answer this is what we've seen kind of in the market today, which is that most like big businesses are interested in at some point, you know, some of them just use one model, but they like to try them out. And my guess is that likely developers will have that same instinct, right? So I think the more kind of open, hey, like it's whatever, it's easy to download your data, move it over. I think that's the sort of goal that we're trying to eventually aim towards.
The one sort of difference I would say is that often developers, particularly when they're just getting started, are like the switching costs are just more laborious for them, right? They're like, hey, I'm building on this tool. It's annoying to switch. Like it's complicated to switch. You have to sort of redo your prompts because all of the models like react a little bit differently just depending on them. And like we have great prompt engineering resources, like please check them out. Also, it just takes some time and effort to like understand the kind of new personality of the model that you're using.
I think my kind of short answer is yes, we're aiming for sort of that more open ecosystem, but also it's sort of tactically hard to do in kind of a perfect way. With interpretability research, I'm curious what you think is coming first to the product? What is looking most optimistic where I could say like turn on a switch and have it only output Arabic or something like that? What do you think is like closest working?
So interpretability is a team that is deeply close to my heart despite me, like not being able to contribute anything of value to them other than telling them how great they are. I think interpretability is to me like the coolest and most exciting area that I researched today because it's fundamentally trying to figure out like what what are these models actually doing, right? It's like the neuroscience of like large models. I actually think we're like not impossibly far, but like not that close from being able to sort of productionize something and interpretability today, right?
The kind of neuroscience analogy is a little bit strained, but I actually think it's it's relevant in one particular way, which is that like we can have a neuroscientist like look at your brain and be like, well, we know that these two things light up when you think about dogs, but it can't sort of like change you thinking about dogs, right? It's like you can sort of diagnose and understand and see things, but you can't actually like go in and change them yet. And I think that's about where we are at sort of the interpretability level.
Could we offer some insight like in the future? I think almost certainly yes, probably not even on a crazy long time scale, right? We could say, hey, if you're playing with sort of, you know, this type of model and it's it's, you know, it's activating strangely. I think that's the type of thing we could like show a sort of visualization to a customer of. I don't actually know how actionable it is, if that makes sense, right? And sort of the same way you're like, well, these these sort of two parts of the model are lighting up or this set of neurons is activating. But I think it's it's it's an interesting area of like very basic science or basic research that I think could have incredible potential applications like a couple of years from now.
I'll ask a question. What maybe give the folks here a taste of what's going to come on the product roadmap? Let's assume that Claude gets smarter and smarter. But what are you all going to add on the developer facing product? And then what should we expect in terms of first party products from you? So first of all, we we are just sort of scrambling day in and day out to try and keep up with the incredible demand that we have. So we are incredibly grateful for everybody's patience. But I think really on the kind of, you know, developer side, we really want to just up level the tools that are available for developers to be able to kind of make make the most use of Claude sort of broadly. I think something that's really interesting, just sort of speaking to the kind of ecosystem point is there's so much opportunity for like knowledge sharing and sort of learning between developers and between people that are kind of using these models and tools. So we're also very interested in just sort of figuring out how to host more information sharing about how to get the most out of these models as well. Oh, you have the mic. Yes, go for it. Given your focus on safety, I was hoping you could comment on how you see the regulatory landscape evolving. Maybe not so much for you specifically, but for the companies that are using your models and others. So something that I think is just always an unknown is like, what's going to happen in the regulatory landscape? And how is it going to impact like how we build and do our work kind of in this space? I think, I mean, first of all, I don't have any amazing questions to say like this set of regulations I expect will happen. But I imagine what we'll see is kind of, it will probably start from the place of the consumer because that's really what kind of government and regulators are sort of most well positioned to try and defend or protect.
And I think a lot of the kind of narrative around data privacy is one that I expect will sort of see emerge, right? Around just, hey, what are you doing with my data? Right? People put personal things into these into sort of these interfaces and they want to know like, are the companies being responsible with that information? Right? What are they doing to protect it? Are they deanonymizing it? We don't train on people's data. But if other companies do, like what does that mean for that person's information? Completely speculative, but that sort of is my guess of where things will start. I also think there is a lot of interest and activation in sort of the policy space right now around like how to develop these models in a way that is safe from a sort of bigger picture, like capital S perspective, right? Some of the sort of scary things I talked about. But again, like regulation is a sort of it's a long process. And I think something we have always aimed to do is work closely with policymakers to give them as much information as possible so that there is thoughtful regulation that will, you know, prevent some of the potentially bad outcomes without sort of stifling innovation. Thank you. Thank you. We have time for one more question. OK, one more. I'm getting, I'm getting looks from Emma. Sorry.
Hey, Daniel. Claude, please. Awesome. Thank you. When you think about the model family and the hierarchy of models, you've any thoughts on whether it is effective to use prompts or if you've done any work internally on giving the smaller models inside that larger models are available at kind of say, hey, this is beyond my knowledge, but this is a good time to use the larger model. That is such a good idea. Are you looking for a job? That is a good. That's a great idea. That has not been something we have currently trained the models to do.
I actually think it's a great idea. Something we, something we have thought about is just how to kind of make the process of switching between models within a business, just much more seamless, right? You can imagine that over time, the model should know like, hey, you're, you're not actually like trying to look at like macroeconomic trends in like the 18th century right now. You're just like trying to answer a sort of frontline question. You don't need opus. You need haiku.
And I think some of that is sort of a research challenge and some of it is actually just a product and engineering challenge, right, which is how well can we kind of get the models to self-identify the level of difficulty and really sort of price optimize right for customers to say, you don't actually need opus to do this task. It's really, really simple. Pay, you know, a tiny fraction of the cost for haiku and we'll just switch you to sonnet if it's sort of somewhere in the middle. We're not like, we're not there yet, but I think that's definitely something we've been, we've been thinking about in a request we've been hearing from customers, but I love your idea of adding in the sort of, sort of like self-knowledge of the models. It's a cool idea.