In short
Anthropic’s “Labs V2” mission to find the next Claude Code, and how Mike Krieger’s team is turning moonshot experiments into external products. The episode also covers competition with OpenAI, the role of agentic “building blocks” across web/desktop, and where AI could create new consumer and healthcare use cases.
Guest backgrounds
Mike Krieger is the Instagram co-founder and now leads Anthropic’s Labs team (working on moonshot bets). He joined Anthropic in May 2024 after previously investing in “future of work” themes.
Key claims
- Labs V2 closes the gap between Claude’s theoretical capability and real everyday usefulness, while scouting what models will need next.
- The “next Claude Code” bar is rising; Labs V2 uses faster 2-week sprints and frequent leadership reviews to avoid projects languishing.
- Computer use and agentic autonomy matured over multiple model generations (Sonnet 3.5 → 3.6/3.7), with “real signs of life” prompting external capability expansion.
- Product strategy: build interoperable components (web/desktop) rather than one “super app,” while still making workflows feel unified.
- Competition: OpenAI’s Codex is strong; Anthropic focuses on product coherence and narrowing the capability gap.
Notable examples
- Labs projects: Claude Code, MCP, Agent Skills; computer use was initially prototyped internally before external rollout.
- Managed Agents and Claude Design are described as derivatives of Labs research (e.g., outcome verification via screenshots/testing; canvas-based “Claude Design” workflows).
- Personalized medicine/health: home genome sequencing, Function health integration, and supplement optimization (Supco) as emerging “white spaces.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOAnthropic's Mission and Labs
0:34 to 1:00
Mike discusses the mission and objectives of Anthropic's labs.
“It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.”
Anthropic's Mission and Labs
1:57 to 3:06
Mike discusses the mission and objectives of Anthropic's labs.
“Mike, it's good to see you here at Cloud Code NSF.”
Projects and Collaborations
3:06 to 4:08
A deep dive into successful projects from Anthropic's labs and their potential.
“Let's put this on the shelf and we'll revisit it, you know, next model release.”
Transition to Labs V2
4:08 to 6:00
Mike shares his experience moving from CPO to leading Labs V2 at Anthropic.
“And when we started, we were spinning up labs.”
Reflections on AI Growth and Challenges
6:00 to 8:52
A reflection on the rapid growth of AI and the evolution of Anthropic.
“And still was very useful in being an evaluation set for how, you know, computer use is evolving in the mall as well.”
Labs V2: Structure and Strategy
8:52 to 11:21
Discussing the structure and strategy behind Labs V2 and its challenges.
“And I don't think I even foresaw how transformative it would be at the time.”
The Future of Labs and AI Collaboration
11:21 to 14:00
Looking ahead to the future of Anthropic's labs and AI initiatives.
“I imagine that puts a lot of pressure on you right now to go, okay, cloud code is like the thing that I have to live up to.”
Anthropic's Labs Structure and Team Dynamics
14:00 to 16:42
Learn about the unique team structure Anthropic has developed for its labs.
“One person who joined, she was early at her last startup and then early to lab.”
Project Management and Project Outcomes
16:42 to 18:24
Discover how Anthropic manages projects and the outcomes they achieve.
“This is the fun part where I try to get to tease out for you as much as possible about these projects.”
Innovations in AI and Personalization
18:24 to 20:37
Understand the innovations in AI, particularly in personalized applications.
“Was that Claude design or is that something else?”
Show all 34 chapters
Exploring AI's Impact on Civic Engagement
20:37 to 22:48
Examine how AI can facilitate civic engagement and representative group formation.
“superhuman or super power and row and like all these companies that are function health.”
AI's Role in Filtering Information
22:48 to 26:07
Learn about the role of AI in filtering and managing information overload.
“And that's where, you know, AI could be helpful in sourcing a representative group rather than trying to make decisions for you, for example.”
Co-Work: Bridging Coding and User Accessibility
26:07 to 28:00
Explore the development of Co-Work and its implications for coding accessibility.
“I used it to work on this interview actually.”
Collaborative Development at Anthropic
28:00 to 29:40
Learn about the synergy between Felix and Boris in developing Co-Work.
“And it actually took a combination of like two, of course, many people were involved here, but I think of like two personalities that really like combined really well.”
Challenges in Product Experience
29:40 to 31:20
Discussion on the challenges of syncing between products and user experiences.
“where Cloud Code Remote, you know, I use all the time where I'm, you know, out on the go and I can kick off a coding task.”
Competitive Landscape in AI
31:20 to 33:00
Explore the competitive dynamics between Claude and Codex in AI coding.
“I mean, the market dynamics are different, but at least like we're...”
Growth and Adoption of Co-Work
33:00 to 34:38
Insights on the growth trajectory of Co-Work and its impact on users.
“I was hoping to hear more about CoWork today.”
Growth and Adoption of Co-Work
35:12 to 35:39
Insights on the growth trajectory of Co-Work and its impact on users.
“It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.”
Navigating Competition and Market Dynamics
36:30 to 39:40
Discussion on Anthropic's competitive strategies and product development.
“Yeah, I came in and I was like, well, this is not really competing with anything.”
The State of Consumer Startups
39:40 to 42:00
Reflect on the challenges and evolution of consumer startups in today's market.
“And that thing that that primarily does is have more people grok that and build really great experiences into their own products.”
Navigating Distribution Challenges in AI
42:00 to 44:42
Explore the evolving distribution landscape for AI products and the challenges founders face.
“it was the fact that it was a little bit wild west still like you could share instagram photos to Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Posterous, just to date how Posterous went on Instagram launched.”
Reflections on AI's Impact on Product Development
44:42 to 47:25
Discuss the emotional and practical implications of using AI tools like Claude in product development.
“And I was wondering, A, like how did you feel emotionally that experience seeing an AI just like build that thing that you and Kevin toiled on for I don't know how long, like in a few minutes.”
The Importance of Human Intuition in AI Development
47:25 to 50:27
Learn about the balance between AI assistance and maintaining human creativity in product design.
“Now, you can use that to your advantage and say, great, I wanted to generate three alternatives and then see which of these feels good.”
Compute Challenges in AI Growth
50:27 to 53:23
Understand the evolution of compute needs in AI startups and the implications for growth.
“decided to join a little AI lab two years ago?”
Anthropic's Unique Company Culture and Mission
53:23 to 56:00
Examine the internal culture at Anthropic and its commitment to positive AI development.
“It's been two years, but that is early in AI world.”
Navigating Job Security in the Age of AI
56:00 to 59:00
Discussion on societal shifts and the importance of human skills amidst AI advancements.
“But like that is how we see the world, right?”
Closing Remarks with Mike
59:00 to 59:16
Wrap-up of the conversation with Mike and insights into AI's future.
“After the break, Ellis is joining me to recap my conversation with Mike and talk about how old we are.”
Closing Remarks with Mike
59:50 to 1:00:17
Wrap-up of the conversation with Mike and insights into AI's future.
“It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.”
Recap of Anthropic’s Developer Conference
1:00:17 to 1:10:00
Discussion on the significance of Anthropic's developer conference and its impact.
“It's me, the Hamburger Helper, here with Alex Heath to discuss an event I was not at for a variety of extemporaneous, extenuating, spontaneous circumstances that may or may not involve founder clients and two-year-olds.”
Anthropic's Unique Culture Compared to Apple
1:10:00 to 1:11:09
Explore the insular culture of Anthropic and its similarities to Apple.
“I think there's reasons to shine a light on that and a magnifying glass and go, well, like, okay, then how does that make sense partnering with Elon or the department of war stuff or whatever?”
Hiring Practices and Cultural Fit at Anthropic
1:11:10 to 1:13:18
Discuss the intense hiring process at Anthropic and its focus on moral values.
“I mean, I'm a believer in kind of two schools of thought.”
Insights from Mike on AI and Market Distribution
1:13:19 to 1:15:04
Mike shares insights on the distribution challenges in AI and the importance of human intuition.
“I mean, I appreciated, you know, his recognition of kind of like the distribution challenges of building product today.”
The Future of Founders and AI Innovation
1:15:05 to 1:17:31
Speculations on the future of founders and the impact of AI on entrepreneurship.
“like MCP is a distribution mechanism was interesting, like an MCP leaderboard and hearing from partners, uh, on MCP that, you know, they get tremendous, you know, inflow of traffic via MCP if Anthropic features them.”
Anticipation for the Live Show and Audience Engagement
1:17:32 to 1:19:26
Excitement about the upcoming live show and the importance of personal connections.
“He's got that New York hustler mindset, tone, body.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Alex Heath:This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.
0:45Alex Heath:Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.
1:00You're never going to be able to fully replicate the feeling of two or three of us against the world. We have X amount of dollars. And if we don't manage to make something work, we're going to have to go wind it down, return the money to investors. That's like you and Kevin back in the day. Exactly.
1:13Alex Heath:What's Anthropics next big product after Claude Code? This week on the show, we've got Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, who now leads the team at Anthropic working on its moonshot bets. One of the dark days of my Anthropic tenure is naming it 3-5-V2. And I can tell you why I waved it up that way. Mike and I recorded this conversation in person on the sidelines of Anthropik's recent Claude Code Conference in San Francisco, where the company announced a big new compute deal with Elon Musk. Hence you guys apparently going to space with Elon. Exactly, right? Yeah, finding new sources of, unexpected sources of compute.
1:46Alex Heath:We get into what Mike is working on now, Anthropik's fierce competition with open AI, and the human work that Mike thinks will continue to matter, even as AI gets better and better. This is Access.
2:01Alex Heath:Mike, it's good to see you here at Cloud Code NSF. I was thinking back to our last conversation and you were more recent in your lab's tenure, but it's been a few months now. Yeah, it's been almost four months now. For people who don't understand labs, I'd actually like to start there because it's a pretty unique setup. We were talking about it when I was at the office a couple months ago. What is it? What is the mission of labs, an anthropic? Yeah, in a nutshell, the way I think about labs and labs, I would call this Labs V2, and we can go into what Labs V1 sort of did and what Labs V2 is meant to do.
2:36But I think of it as doing two things. One is closing the gap between what Claude is theoretically capable of and how that actually shows up for people in their kind of everyday lives, right? So what products or prototypes or projects do we build that sort of illustrate how you could unlock more of that sort of potential, like close more of that gap? We can unpack what that means. And the second piece is, we're the sort of advanced scouts figuring out where the model is going to need to go in the future to meet different needs for people. And so, you know, a successful labs project might look like a prototype that we build and then say, you know what, the models actually aren't good enough to do this yet.
3:14Let's put this on the shelf and we'll revisit it, you know, next model release. Or we'll use that as an evaluation for future model development and basically iterate from there. So what, you know, versus, you know, a product lab at a pure product company where maybe the success criteria is did you ship a product or not? There's other ways in which this labs initiative can sort of inform the direction of where Anthropic is going.
3:38Alex Heath:And labs has produced some hits, right? It's Claude Code is one, MCP. What are the others? Agent Skills is another, you know, big piece from labs as well. And then maybe I'll talk about one other one, which was one we didn't ship at the time, but actually was one of those research informing ones, which was computer use. So I joined Anthropik May 2024. Next week is my two-year anniversary, we call it. Is it anniversary, really? Yeah, everything's ants, which I resisted at first. No, I just don't break. So we don't dog food, we eat ant food. Oh, my God. This is my two-year anniversary. And when we started, we were spinning up labs.
4:16And one of the first projects that was pitched was, hey, why don't we try having Claude use a computer and do computer use?
4:23Alex Heath:This was in the Sonnet what era? This was Sonnet 3.5. So the first model I was sort of part of launching was Sonnet 3.5. That was my third week. Like we joked that Anthropic doesn't do onboarding projects. They just stick like a very hard project with you. And mine was like, all right, great. Week three, like launching. Ship a model. Ship a model. and actually 3.5 was a really interesting model because it was one of the first ones that really unlocked some coding use cases. Not quite full Agenta coding, but the beginnings of that. So we put Sonnet 3.5 and we built a computer use product around it and it had a lot of problems.
4:58It was too slow at doing the computer use piece. It was not accurate enough. It couldn't see very well and so it would see the screen and say, oh, I need to click on that button and then you would click on something else that was actually very helpful to have built that sort of not quite working harness because then when sonnet three about the time we call it three five v2 we can get into that that was one of the dark days of my anthropic tenure naming it three five v2 and i can tell you why we ended up that way um and then no we've retconned it to three six try three six still not quite good enough some sense of life and then three seven i remember this day really vividly because I was in New York on a trip to visit the New York team.
5:40And I got a ping like, hey, we think this actually, that thing that we had built in labs at that point was nine months old, is showing real signs of life with Sonnet 3.7. And we think it's time to actually open up computer use as a capability that we talk about externally. That was nine months of trying out new models every couple of months and trying it in the harness. So even though at that point, labs had kind of let that project go by the wayside, And still was very useful in being an evaluation set for how, you know, computer use is evolving in the mall as well.
6:10Alex Heath:When you joined, I mean, you were chief product officer when you first joined. And I remember going, huh, Mike, who, you know, co-founded Instagram, who I think of as a very consumer forward founder, is joining the enterprise AI company. Yeah. And we may have even talked about it at the time, but I was just like, that's an interesting bet. In hindsight, a correct bet. And you obviously, the timing was incredible. I'm curious, you know, from joining as CPO where you're overseeing all of product and product and AI is kind of a nebulous term and it changes quite a bit, right? Yeah. How did you get to four-ish, five-ish months ago going to labs where my understanding is you're an IC.
6:51Alex Heath:Do you actually manage anywhere? Yeah, I have no. We're actually entering our performance review cycle. That's what you wanted. You wanted to get out of performance reviews. Exactly. I was like, I went into the portal, you know, where you get your list of all the reviews you're going to have to write. And it was like, you have to write your own review. review, review your manager review, then that's it. Now Claude does the reviews. Claude actually does help with reviews, which is helpful. They won't write all of it for you, but it's useful even being like, what did I do the last six months? I think the company's been through phases and different parts of it.
7:21I think it's been more or less suited to what truly drives me. So when I joined, all of product engineering was maybe 30 people, maybe split evenly across the AP. Product and engineering? Yeah, like product engineering. So we had engineering teams like working on research infrastructure and some scalability pieces. But those are like core people working on building at the time, Cloud AI and what we called the API. We didn't call it the Cloud Platform at the time. Maybe 30 people, maybe 35, like very, very small. Still felt very much like in the beginning. And there was still so much. I still think there is, but there was still much at the time shaping of what the product even meant.
7:56You know, at the time, Cloud AI had no projects, no artifacts. It was basically a list of conversations that you had with Claude with effectively no frills on top. So it felt like joining a startup that was trying to figure out, you know, it had tailwinds for sure. You know, at the time I joined the kind of Opus, Sonnet and Haiku 3 series had come out. And that was the first series where Anthropic had put out something that was sort of at least frontier adjacent or, you know, close to the frontier. So much left to do in terms of like, what is this product going to be? And the reason that, you know, even though my background was more on consumer, the reason I got very excited was the time between Instagram and Anthropic.
8:35One of the things that Kevin, my Instagram company, I did is spend a lot of time doing investing. And we had a whole sort of set of investments that we were looking at in terms of what is the future of work and how is work going to get done? And Anthropic felt very much like it could help unlock a lot of that kind of that theme, right? Which is what happens when you have a really intelligent assistant helping you. And I don't think I even foresaw how transformative it would be at the time.
8:58Alex Heath:You were like, oh, this interesting little AI company, this may help with my investing. Right. This might help with some of the themes that we've been thinking about. But of course, it transformed it much more. So that was phase one where tiny team, you could count the number of initiatives you had going on one hand. Then we could talk to some of the different chapters in depth. But you fast forward it to the end of last year, and the product team is hundreds of people. We have a portfolio of projects and a lot of the work is deploying, understanding, customer facing management layers, all of these things that just learned over time.
9:32There are people that love it and thrive it. And I am super respectful of those. And it's one of mine where I have a great coach and she calls it your zone of competence. It's like the things you are good at and like you're fine, like you're probably doing well, but it's not the thing that ultimately like fuels you and drives you. And that's a good, that's almost the most dangerous place to be because you could keep doing it for a very, very long time, but it is not your place of maximum sort of like fire. Right. And so I entered Q4 of last year and started having conversations with Danielle like this.
10:02You know, we've grown up already. We've we've speed run a lot of the growth that usually would take five years, you know, so even though it only been about two years or.
10:08Alex Heath:Yeah, it's been decent. Yeah, it's been, you know, and the team growth and the product portfolio. I was like, I think I want to go and do another new company. And she was like, well, you know, is it about leaving Anthropica? Is it about shifting what you want to do? And I was like, I love the company. Like the people here are amazing. I love the technology, the mission, et cetera. And so that was also when we were spinning labs back up because labs we own was so successful that all the projects graduated and left nobody behind. And so we kind of wound it down and had it kind of on ice. So let's spin labs back up and I'm going to go back to being a builder.
10:41And it's, you know, everybody who sees me in and out of work is like, Mike, you look so happy.
10:46Alex Heath:Some of your colleagues were telling me that earlier today. Mike's having the best time. And, you know, I still am my own harshest critic. So I'm always, every day, I'm like, how do I, like, you know, what can we do? What can we build? What are we proving out here? So it's definitely not easy, but it is definitely much more aligned with, like, the things that truly drive me. We don't have to spend too much time on this, but I am fascinated by tech companies doing these kind of moonshot, zero to one labs things. I mean, Alphabet's probably the greatest example, but I mean, history is littered with these.
11:18Alex Heath:And some of them work, some of them don't. V1 of Labs and Anthropic certainly worked if you look at the products. I imagine that puts a lot of pressure on you right now to go, okay, cloud code is like the thing that I have to live up to. Right. Well, it's funny because one of the like sort of internal missions that I was like, oh, we want to find the next cloud code, which was already a high bar when we started Labs V2. But since then, it's like growing. So it's like even higher. So I think there's a few things that you need to do. Like, and I think it's helpful that I've had the startup experience a couple of times because you're never going to be able to fully replicate the feeling of there's two or three of us against the world.
11:56We have X amount of dollars. And if we don't manage to make something work, we're going to have to go wind it down, return the money to investors. That's like you and Kevin back in the day.
12:04Alex Heath:Exactly. And like, I remember that existential sort of question. Like I lived with me every single day. Like this doesn't work. like, you know, I'm not going to have this independence. I'm not going to be able to work on this thing that I really care about. That's hard to manufacture inside a company unless you want to create some very complicated structure. And I've seen that as well. Before we kickstarted Labs V2, I went through and studied as many of these sort of company labs initiatives. And you had ones where they get equity in the thing that they create. Which Alphabet still does. Yeah.
12:35And, you know, they're all trying to patch around the sense of it. The thing that we have found works well, one, because I think Anthropic has attracted just a lot of really high agency, ambitious, but also mission aligned people, is that the thing to watch out for is less make sure that people are incentivized to do their best work or put everything they can into the project. And it's more how do you make it not just a comfortable place for okay ideas to get pulled out for months at a time. And so the way we've gone about doing this is actually shortening the timeline. So Labs V1, we were on effectively four to six week review cadences where a project would be sort of funded.
13:14And then they would have about six weeks to prove some sort of things. Here we actually run two-week sprints. And every two weeks, every project goes in front of the whole Labs leadership. And it's not like a murder board type meeting. It's usually, you know, a reasonable meeting unless the project is really going off the rails. But we really hold every project. And we truly do to this question of what have you learned the last two weeks? And have we learned enough? Like sometimes you've learned enough in the project. You say, that project was great. It did what it needed to do. And we don't actually need to spend another two weeks on it.
13:44And right now, things are moving so fast. And you can build so quickly with these models that the opportunity cost of letting a project languish for an extra four weeks is actually quite high. And that's, I think, the best thing we've done with Labs V2 is better sort of turn the crank so that we're at least measuring our learning, if not the external impact every two weeks.
14:04Alex Heath:and most of the people in labs are former founders a lot of them are former founders that's a criteria you have for we have sort of two roles in labs there's the we call them all bets because they're all you know pretty high high variance right so we have bets and then we have bet leads so you know if you're the kind of spiritual directly responsible individual those tend to be founders almost exclusively and then we have just people on labs and those might just be builders that were maybe the first employee at a startup have seen that zero to one or just love to build. One person who joined, she was early at her last startup and then early to lab.
14:39So she's got that sort of, I can span the stack, I can do whatever needs to get done. And that's as important, I think, as the, you don't want just pure founders, you also need that complementary, like founding team energy too.
14:50Alex Heath:My co-host, Ellis, couldn't be here, but he sent me some questions to ask you. And one of them was, is this founder super group essentially with labs that you formed, Is this a new model for company structure in general, especially with AI? Or is this a thing that you think is unique to a company like Anthropic? That's a really good question. I think there is going to be much more, many more teams like this where a small group with the models, the models are not perfect. So you still need, you know, founders with taste and direction. And there's, you know, I spent yesterday example, I spent about two hours debating this labs project I'm working on, like what the shape of, you know, in this case, like what multiplayer looks like within this product.
15:36That was time that was really valuable and very human. It was all like in a room, us hashing stuff out. And then I had Claude work on all the ideas asynchronously for the next like 12 hours. Right. But to have that taste of what are the things we need to debate up front? What are the things that we should just go and implement? Right. Because the models will make a lot of decisions for you if you don't specify them. So I think that's still a useful, very important role that a founder type can play. But once you get that right structure, you can do a lot. I did a little retrospective of what we build in labs so far.
16:08It's been four months. And there are projects that we sort of conceived of in January and shipped to testing in February and wound down in March or conceived of in February and are now cloud designed. Right. Like there's all these different things that have already happened. The velocity is really, really high. And I think more companies are going to shift to this model of smaller teams, give them autonomy, have a person that feels accountable and sort of can drive that. And then don't overstaff it to begin with. We've really learned that with Labs V2, like you don't want to add five people to a project up front.
16:39You want to start with two or three, much more like a startup.
16:42Alex Heath:This is the fun part where I try to get to tease out for you as much as possible about these projects. So in March, when we met last, you told me that you were applying Claude to running for a really long time, this kind of long horizon problem. And you were leading that project. Are you still leading that project? No. So that's a great one where we actually put that project on ice, but the learnings graduated into outcomes, which we announced today in Managed Agents. So that whole idea of rubric based sort of autonomy for Claude to be able to perform a task towards an end or a goal rather than a sort of just an individual prompt that you gave it very spiritually based on the things that we had been exploring in the labs.
17:22And so that I was mapping out exactly that project and where all the tendrils became, you know, and it's a couple of two themes that you saw on stage this morning that were kind of direct derivatives of that labs project. One was outcomes and the other one in Boris's demo, you had the cloud code actually verify its work by taking screenshots and testing out what it was doing. That was a big part of what we were pushing on with that project because it's one thing for cloud to look at its code and say, looks good to me. It's another one for it to fully explore. And we in the project I was leading, we were even looking at things like having cloud take videos of all the work that had done and then have it scrubbed through its own videos and say, oh, that animation is broken.
17:59And it wouldn't have been able to tell just from pure screenshot verification. So yeah, that was one that we chatted in March was in development. We've since basically put on eyes. It's still run. So internally, we still use it for some demos, but it's mostly been useful as a sort of source of upstream energy.
18:16Alex Heath:The other one was Claude choosing its own form was I think the way you put it and introspecting and being like, for this next conversation, instead of a command line interface, I'm going to be a website. Was that Claude design or is that something else? So there's a lot of spiritual alignment. It is something else. Although the kind of question we're pulling on now is like, Cloud Design is an instance of effectively like agent plus canvas, right? And you can imagine a lot more of those. And even within Cloud Design, you know, I've done everything from writing technical specs. My new favorite way of writing technical documentation is actually in Cloud Design because you can have it visualize like, how's the information flow work?
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18:52And how could it work differently? And actually just watch it evolve. But that's actually my probably like number two use case behind slides, which I use cloud design all the time for. But you can imagine other formats that could live in that canvas as well. And so that's one LabZ thing that we're pulling on is like cloud design, but for even more sort of types or applications and things like that. And that's, I think, an exciting.
19:13Alex Heath:Is it just more generalized productivity software? Is that the idea? I think that's like, yeah, that's definitely a theme to pull on, which is like and productivity software that hopefully can be like pretty custom to you. I think that's an interesting trend to think about. What are the other just kind of white spaces that you're thinking about right now in AI? I mean, I think as the models improve, their ability to be useful partners in things like life sciences, I think is really interesting. I've started to see more and more. There was a great thread on X of somebody that did their full genome sequencing at home.
19:45And actually, he's now professionalized it. So he'll come over to your house and do it for you. I'm very interested in this because I'm like a, you know, self knowledge geek. So I'm like, want to figure out how to do this. And what I've told from people that like know the space is that even, you know, the gap between models three, four months ago and something like Opus 4.7 and being actually useful sort of parsers of, you know, genetic data and like finding inferences or ingesting your labs. Like it's now actually useful versus like, oh, yeah, cute. Like, yes, that is the thing that a doctor would have said if you looked at it or, you know.
20:19we already knew from heuristics. That's one white space interesting area. Like I'm very interested in that whole area of like personalized medicine and where those things are going to evolve to. I feel like we're at the cusp there, you know, and I feel like there's still so much overhang, you know, what we call like the gap between like what's now possible.
20:35Alex Heath:Well, there's all these startups popping up like, you know, superhuman or super power and row and like all these companies that are function health. I mean, yeah, that are doing stuff like this. Yeah, exactly. And we'd like in January when we did our initial cloud for healthcare, one of the things we did is we partnered with Function so you can bring your lab results into cloud and do that. I started using a service this week called Supco for supplements. So you put all your supplements in. It knows how they interact. And then it kind of gives you a recommendation of like, you don't need to take all eight of these.
21:08Oh, that's actually really helpful. And now the next step, which they don't have, but like I could imagine somebody doing is, And, you know, based on your last run of your labs or based on your genetics data, we think you might be a super responder to this or that. So that whole area, like there's there's so much interesting. And that's even just on like call those the like optimization side. Think about all of the sort of like areas that are like currently underserved by medicine either because they don't have like local access to good health care. And like we can help supplement that. So a lot of interesting white space there that I think is super interesting.
21:41The other area that, it's funny, I was on stage maybe a year ago at a consumer AI conference that Forerunner put together. And I was talking to founders like, what is going to be the consumer AI breakout case beyond chat and list assistance? And I still haven't seen it. You know, maybe health feels like it's not quite in the theme of what I'm describing, you know. And like AI powered dating feels like there's maybe something there, but there's kind of a natural. Oh, we're going to see a cloud dating service? Yeah, I don't think we'll see a cloud dating service, but maybe, you know, the downstream cloud, you know, one of our API customers might create something like that.
22:20I don't think we could build that one in-house. But yeah, I think it's still interesting white space around, can AI actually be useful in helping us either understand ourselves or our world or our communities in a way that is connecting rather than distancing? An interesting example, I've been getting interested in civic engagement and how you get representative groups together for civic debate. It's not an area I'm an expert in, but I've gotten interested in it. And that's where, you know, AI could be helpful in sourcing a representative group rather than trying to make decisions for you, for example.
22:55Like keep the humans in there, but make sure that we're listening to the right voices, for example.
22:58Alex Heath:Yeah, I was wondering if you still have the social media bug in you or not. Less the social media bug, you know, and it's like probably the most interesting-ish idea in that has been something that they actually explored in Sora that that was interesting was describe the algorithm you want and we will like degenerate it for you. That's coming everywhere now. I mean, that's in threads. X has it to a degree. I think that's going to be standardized. I agree. But I think, yeah, I use that in Spotify. Spotify, I create these really cursed playlists where my daughter and I can't agree with it to listen to.
23:28We just make a Spotify playlist that is the intersection of the two. So we end up with like pavement plus frozen music. Oh, wow. It's very good. Okay, I like that. The Spotify DJ has some thoughts. That's great. But yeah, I think that that I think is one way in which it's personalizing us. you know, an idea I was kicking around more recently, I don't think this is quite lab-shaped, but maybe somebody should build it, is can AI be a useful sort of like filterer of all the noise out there? I've started using dispatch and co-work for this reason. Like I have, otherwise I am a like incurable news junkie and I will like check every news site and like read a lot.
24:06And there's value to that, but at some point I'm like, am I, I'm reading the same stories over again. So I have my like now kind of channeling artifact, to my previous startup, like my daily brief of the places I tend to check. And often I'll click through and read those stories, but it's a useful sort of, I don't feel like I need to go check these 12 websites, you know, first thing in the morning, it can kind of give me the trends and I can go deeper on what's, what's, you know, as long as you're still reading the sources newsletter,
24:29Alex Heath:Mike, you can synthesize. Exactly. That goes straight to the inbox. Yeah. I mean, I did actually read, I don't know if it was a leak on X or what, that you guys are thinking about something more proactive, I don't know, maybe it's Orbit or something where you may do that, what you're talking about more proactively, bring things into, I don't know if it's co-work or another part of the interface, but for the more consumer audience. Do you think that's an opportunity? Yeah, I think that proactive sort of, anytime you see your power users create those kind of use cases, it's an interesting question to ask, like, what would it mean to build more of that built in and that for sure is you know the scheduled daily briefing or you know uh proactive you know monitoring of of either you know we're a very slack heavy shop at anthropic so sort of proactive slack monitoring or email i've started doing this as well like where my my morning cloud routine is the news one i just talked about outside of it scan superhuman which is what i use for personally launched a mcp so now uh it'll go through and it's great because it knows about the split.
25:30So it kind of, yeah, okay, you really should look at this one. And like, some of these are like things you can read later. And it's actually when I check first before I open my inbox. Oh, and then like, there's like some shopping thing that I'm looking at where I'm like waiting for the thing to pop up. And like, rather than like, obsessively check every morning, I'm like, quad can go. Is this a sneaker drop? I should I should use it for it's probably not even fast enough for sneaker drops. You need, you know, or it's all the rabbit holes, you know, And there's always that balance. You don't want to remove the joy of, sometimes it's fun to get lost in an internet rabbit hole every once in a while, but maybe do it a little bit more consciously rather than the thing that you're just like noodling on in the background.
26:08Alex Heath:Yeah, I am a co-work power user. I use it every day. I used it to work on this interview actually. And I use it to write. I use it for everything. And it's been pretty transformational. And it's something that I've personally gotten my life on and friends on. And I do feel like it's still early. Like I think most people are probably not doing what I'm doing. And Co-Work is still fairly, I don't know, from a product perspective, it's a little bit divorced still from chat, classic cloud chat and cloud code. These are three things that I don't think really long-term will be three things. I agree with that.
26:45Alex Heath:And the thing some of your colleagues were telling me when I was in the office a couple months ago was like maybe Co-Work is the front-end interface for everything eventually. and Co-Work was a labs thing before you got to labs, right? But you were CPO in that ship. So I'm curious, what was the insight with Co-Work when you guys shipped that? Like was there a moment where you were like, we have to abstract away the coding for normies, and that's an opportunity, or was it something else? It was, so I give Dario a lot of credit here. He, you know, Anthropic has such a diverse set of things that we're thinking about at a given time, like the research side, the product side, the commercial side, compute policy societal impact that it's not a typical company where like the product and the go-to-market are the two things that matter and that's like what the CEO ends up spending a lot of time on so Dario's attention kind of shifts between different areas depending on what's most urgent but shortly before co-work ship he's like look I've been seeing this interesting trend of people using cloud code for personal use cases it's very hard to do that for most people they don't have to get a terminal that feels like and it's like what would it mean to build cloud code for everything else.
27:51And that was a very useful, and I think it's like how he operates. He wasn't like, here's the mock-up or here's the like - That was your problem. It was like, yeah, okay. Like that's a product. He felt like go and solve that. And it actually took a combination of like two, of course, many people were involved here, but I think of like two personalities that really like combined really well. One was Felix, who was the creator. He was like one of the main electron maintainers, like knows desktop software, or at least like desktop web software really, really well, and have been like noodling on this problem of like, how do you enable people to do work on their computers?
28:26And then Boris, who has obviously like deep cloud code knowledge. And once we put the two of them together, plus their teams, you know, working together, it was only a couple of weeks before we were able to ship co-work. Because, not because all the work happened in those tweaks, but because a lot of thinking had been happening, both on the cloud code side and the desktop side around, how do we enable this use case for more than just coders? because the models are powerful, authentic engines. And how do we give that engine to more people? But I completely agree with you that right now it feels like, it's less that we're shipping our org chart because, you know.
28:58It kind of feels that way a little bit. But we are shipping our harness strategy or something, like in a way that I don't think makes sense to most people as well.
29:06Alex Heath:Well, it's also a bad product experience because like my co-work thread can't sync to my Claude mobile app. Yes. So like I couldn't take the interview prep doc. I had been spending time and co-work with me on my phone. Right, and some of these projects or products naturally suggest their next evolution. Like I'm a huge dispatch power user, so dispatch lets you access your co-work remotely, but you got to run your computer, right? So your next logical thing is like, well, this would be great if I didn't have to leave my computer on all the time. So how can we evolve it in that direction? Whereas Cloud Code has been on that journey, but a year ahead, maybe six months ahead of it, where Cloud Code Remote, you know, I use all the time where I'm, you know, out on the go and I can kick off a coding task.
29:45And by the time I'm back, it's often put up a pull request. So you can imagine similar things for Coorg. But I agree, we're definitely in the, we let a lot of, you know, things proliferate, which is great for innovation. But now I think there's, even for like context and continuity value, the fact that you had a conversation here versus here shouldn't be something you should ever think of. My wife is all the time. She's like, I don't remember, Or was that a coding thing I did? Or did I ask it in chat? Or was it Co-Work? Like that feels like a broken abstraction that we need to fix.
30:11Alex Heath:And it makes a lot of sense when I'd spend time with the OpenAI folks and their super app strategy and what they're going at with Codex. Because it is the end state of kind of what you guys got to first with Co-Work. It's unifying all of that. And I'm wondering if, A, you think that super app approach is the right one for AI. And if that puts more pressure on you guys. Because I think OpenAI has realized that this is a huge opportunity to bring coding, the power of coding to people who aren't coders. Right. And they're going at it very fast. Yeah. And Codex is good. The new model is good and Codex is doing well for them.
30:46Alex Heath:So I'm curious, you know, Claude had that huge surge with coding and is still considered, you know, widely, I think, leading in code. But Codex is really nipping in your else heels, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's gotten, I always had the most interesting times at Instagram when we had like a snap, for example. Like as an interesting competitor in the same space, but with a different approach in some ways. And in a fast developing market, you end up having some ideas that you borrow from them, some ideas they borrow from you. So ants the snap in this analogy? What's that? I don't know which is which.
31:20I mean, the market dynamics are different, but at least like we're... Market caps are also a little different. Yeah, and actually the personalities of the companies are very, very different. but at least in terms of, you know, the way I always thought about it was, I don't know that every competitive situation resolves to this, but at least that one felt like it did, which is we each had our own strengths and we each saw the future in sort of, not exactly the same way, but directionally similar ways. And it was a really interesting question of like how each company evolved to get to those different places.
31:51For Instagram, for example, we were known as like the really precious once a week photo and we wanted to get to a place where people were more free to share. And that's where, you know, being able to adopt stories really made a difference for us. And then I think for Snap, it was they wanted more of the influencer celebrity piece as well, because that, you know, there was a growing interest in there. And it's like how managing both as well, maybe an overextended metaphor. But when I think about for us, like it is really interesting, I think, to have OpenAI in the space as well. And I think for us, it's the two things I think are most important.
32:25One is what we were just talking about, just like reconciling and making sure that like our product makes sense, you know, whether it's on the web or whether it's on the desktop. I don't think it needs to be a single app or super app, but at least that you're sort of building blocks all talk to each other and all make sense together. And then two is continue to close that gap because even co-worker, any of the products right now, the gap between even inside Anthropic, I was just talking to one of our recruiters. He is like the most extreme co-worker user. He's actually our top co-worker user who's not a coder at the company.
32:56And you see his workflows and they're amazing, but that is not how most of the recruiting team operates, even at Anthropic, right? So that is, I think, whether the shape is super app or not, like that is the goal is can you, again, back to labs, like that's part of what we need to do is can we create the shapes, the form factors that actually make it so either that one recruiter's knowledge spreads really quickly and it's very easy for everybody else to adopt that workflow or for everybody to get to that level of sort of confidence in using Cloud.
33:22Alex Heath:I was hoping to hear more about CoWork today. I mean, I know it's a developer conference, but I'm curious, like how is CoWork growing relative to CloudCode? Is it growing faster? Anything on that? I think index to, I don't know, relative to like overall coding, coding is growing really, really fast, but definitely on the like trajectory that CloudCode was on or faster, which is really exciting. Like I feel like every couple of days, one of our slacks that is more like productivity oriented will show some like, you know, new milestone of work. co-workers and it's like it's very exciting to see that grow i think personally very exciting because i always wanted us to reach beyond kind of pure code in terms of like impact um so the growth has been really really good and we talk to enterprises and they'll say great i adopted co-work and i'm seeing that phenomenon of some people really get it some people still need a lot of hand holding different departments are using it differently um it's a good problem to have because you know the product is capable of the right things in the right sort of shape and with the right person, but there's definitely still a delta there.
34:22And I think the remaining, like it'll accelerate growth a lot further when we can actually feel like for most people, it doesn't take a lot of ramp up to get to that level of like, oh, AI is actually really helping me.
34:33Alex Heath:Yeah.
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35:39Alex Heath:Speaking of competition, this was a conversation you and I had, God, I want to say a year and a half ago at a conference, was competing with customers. And this was before you guys had launched Cloud Code, the product. I think this was, and we were talking about, well, you know, you have some of these, like Cursor was a giant customer. Like, how is that going to work? And you had to make that call and you don't have to do that as CPO anymore, I assume. But as not the CPO anymore. But how is that these days? And we've danced around it, but there was Cloud Design and the Figma controversy and you were on the Figma board and you had to step down.
36:14Alex Heath:and Dylan has said nice things about you and that it didn't seem like it was necessarily you. But that was an example where I think the market and everyone broadly looks at what's happening and goes, oh, man, Anthropix is just like coming for every key vertical. And that was the Figma one felt a little dicey. It's definitely more complicated than it was when we had, you know, the cloud, the cloud AI. Yeah, I came in and I was like, well, this is not really competing with anything. It's like a brand new form factor. and we're still, I think, careful and thoughtful about the products that we build.
36:46And I think it's only when there is something, the value that we are bringing by shipping something, because we have amazing customers on the cloud platform, right? Like a lot of people inside the company who are really invested in these customers sort of, you know, success as well. Is, are we showing some direction that we think the industry could go? And hopefully it's like a rising tide where a lot of companies sort of adopt that way of thinking. I mean, Cloud Code being a great example where the attention wasn't in the terminal. It was more in the editor, right? And it's really shifted how almost the entire industry has gone, even though, yes, there were people who were thinking about the terminal beforehand, right?
37:20Like that, I think shipping Cloud Code in the way that we did and giving the attention that we did, did that as well. And I think that's my hope for any of these products is not that they become the only product in their space. That would be a tragedy. I like a diversity of products to exist. But instead that they are, you know, one, they make sense within our product portfolio. So, you know, the fact that you've got all your MCPs connected in Cloud AI should hopefully make these other products better, for example. And two, that they showed the way forward where, you know, with Cloud Design, for example, it was being really agent first and giving the agent like a lot of sort of control over what it outputs.
37:55It leads to a really specific product experience. Like for me, it's really useful for things like, you know, slides where I can kind of think along with the agent, but also be producing alongside.
38:03Alex Heath:You don't see it as cannibalizing Figma? I think there are different use cases. like I like there is production and there is like ref refinement and that there is collaboration and that like is a real big most strong. So I love those folks. Right. I think that like that product is really well tuned for that use case. And then there is what I tend to use cloud design for because I'm not a full time designer, you know, so I'm doing more either production of, you know, a, you know, visual communication. kind of artifact, lowercase a artifact, or some exploration of interactivity where the purpose is not the polish or production.
38:41It's the sort of early mock-up feel of it. I was mocking something up in our iOS app in Cloud Design and the pixels looked quite different than the things that we would eventually ship, but it pointed the way at what I thought we should be able to do in that space. And so I think they'll both, I mean, use Cloud Design and Figma as an example, but in any of these, like they're all continuing to evolve. And again, I think good ideas from us will hopefully make their way in other places and vice versa. And I think it's more around we're all together figuring out what shape of product do we need to build to make the most of the agents?
39:16I was having a good conversation with one of our researchers this week, and they were saying, look, the more you constrain the agent's behavior, try to be over-specific on it, the less sort of naturally emergent magic is going to happen in there as well. And like that was, I mean, Cloud Code, I think channeled that, even Co-Work channeled that a little bit versus Cloud AI, where it was more like you are chatting, you are doing these really specific things. And I think we'll build products of that shape. And that thing that that primarily does is have more people grok that and build really great experiences into their own products.
39:49Like, great, because hopefully those are Cloud Power and hopefully Cloud remains the best or one of the best at being a great sort of agentic underpinning for these sort of next generation AI products. But the headline is, it's definitely more complicated, but I think the same principles we try to apply then, which is, you know, being thoughtful about where we enter and then making sure that the building blocks are still available on the platform, like manage agents, like the things that you can now build on top of manage agents are, you know, as powerful as anything that we can build inside the house.
40:20And we're not like, other than for safety reasons, like not releasing a model because, you know, it gives us an edge. That's been a very principled approach that we've taken. And then we're only going to ship a fully featured product if we think it says something new.
40:33Alex Heath:So you and Dylan are good. I love Dylan. I, you know, he's a former guest. So I got to, I got to just make sure I mean, I love Dylan and I like, I have so much respect for what they're doing. This was another Ellis question on this topic. Everyone, especially in the early stage community, is debating the viability of, I think, consumer startups more right now, especially with just like what is Anthropic going to do next? What's the next cloud design or what is OpenAI going to do next? And enterprise feels a little safer. Dario was talking today about, you know, he thinks there'll be a billion dollar one person company this year.
41:09Alex Heath:I bet that would be an enterprise company. But what do you think about, yeah, the state of consumer startups? And if you were yourself when you were starting Instagram with Kevin and you were looking at what's happening, what would you have done differently now? Because, like, the world's changed quite a bit and it seems like a harder time to be doing this. I think a radically oversimplified version of consumer, like, breakouts is there needs to be some, like, new capability or form factor. like for us it was the camera phone right and nobody calls it the camera phone anymore because that's just what phones do they have cameras um uh you know or you know maybe it was more more uh rich media like the tick tocks and reels of the world because there was now the ability to stream right and then some distribution mechanism that lets you break out and for us it was the fact that it was a little bit wild west still like you could share instagram photos to Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Posterous, just to date how Posterous went on Instagram launched.
42:11And all of those allowed you to freely link back to your product. And so you could create that cycle. Such a different time these days, right? And so when I talk to founders like Matt, who founded Lockett, they have found ways of like, all right, you're in the conversation on TikTok and therefore like that leads you to some interesting kind of growth moments. I think it's a much harder distribution. Like it's a far less predictable sort of distribution ecosystem than we were working with. And so I think more than any AI player, I think that's actually probably the biggest trend or biggest challenge right now is how do you break out when you have, you know, before maybe you were competing with Facebook and maybe their time spent, I'm kind of making this up, was like 15 minutes a day.
42:56Now you're competing with TikTok, which I bet their time spent might be over an hour a day, which is frankly kind of crazy, but it is the way it is. you're just trying to displace some of that. So if you have those two components, on the former side, maybe it's around some novel interaction with some AI-powered being, or the opposite, where it's AI helping you get outside and touching grass and having more of those real-world interactions, whatever that is. But you still have to solve that second piece. And if you think about where a lot of attention is shifting these days, it is to these chat agents.
43:29And I don't think anybody has really figured out what it means to, what does it mean to go viral on a chatbot? It's kind of a nonsensical question today. Maybe there's something there where, you know, we launched MCP apps as an open standard.
43:42Alex Heath:Maybe that's a new app store kind of distribution potentially. And you can bring that in. And like maybe that will be the first, like is the first MCP app to go viral is something consumery? That would be interesting. That's a novel distribution mechanism. I was talking to somebody. oh, it was somebody who works at like a nonprofit explorer. And we featured them in like a, we did an article about how like MCP is being used for a new thing. And he's like, oh, it was really interesting seeing like what constitutes viral growth for a nonprofit explorer thing, which is like huge numbers. But he was like, I checked the connector list and we were in the top five.
44:16Next, like Gmail and Slack for a couple of days. And he's like, I got a ton of attention. So yeah, so maybe, you know, I'm thinking out loud here. And this is very much like exploring thoughts with you, which is fun, but maybe, you know, We might not land on like the perfect answer, but maybe that is a thing that we'll start seeing is can you provide enough utility within the sort of frame of, you know, a Claude or a ChatGPT or a Gemini and then figure out how that spreads in some interesting way. I'd love to see that. I think that'd be interesting. Yeah.
44:44Alex Heath:You did a pod with Dan Shipper from Every recently and I was listening to it and you were talking about using Claude to rebuild bourbon, which for people who don't know was the app that predated Instagram that you guys turned into Instagram. and it did it in like a few minutes. And I was wondering, A, like how did you feel emotionally that experience seeing an AI just like build that thing that you and Kevin toiled on for I don't know how long, like in a few minutes. And also if 2010 Mike had access to Claude today, would Instagram still happen? Yeah, that's a really good question. Because I would imagine the AI would have maybe not gotten there by itself.
45:22Yeah, I think that was my reflection having built it, it was one I knew exactly what I told it to build. And actually, I told Dan, this was really funny, because it over built, it actually built filters into bourbon, which bourbon did not have. We launched that with Instagram, because bourbon was totally web based. And the time there wasn't anything like WebGL to do filtering, right? So it's pretty interesting to see what it came up with, even in that I think so much of product going back to our conversation on like the founder teams inside Anthropic. So much of the work is still asking the hard questions, putting it in front of people.
45:54I love both love and hate the feeling of like getting smacked in the face the first time you put out a product and somebody, somebody and they're like, what? I have no idea what this is. Or like, I'm so confused, right? My first job out of school is a UX researcher. We can wake up, bring people into the lab. I still love that. You bring people in and the fact that it was built using Claude or handwritten doesn't matter to the end user. They just carry the product useful and usable. And, you know, this is a create some kind of moment of delight, that's so hard. Like, Claude is not going to solve for that.
46:24So, I mean, if we had Claude back in 2010, for sure there were, like, ways in which we were slower at delivering on things that I would have wanted us to be, especially when the thing to build became really clear, right? We launched, we knew we wanted to build app mentions, and that was probably a week of wiring it up from the user interface, fighting with the text layout engine at the time, like, persisting on the server. Could have done that faster and delivered value to users quicker. But I don't think that the journey from Instagram, from Bourbon to Instagram is something that Claude would have changed much of other than in some of the like coding sports that we that we did.
47:00But zero to one coding, at least the time I didn't feel like often like that was the limiting factor was the thinking and the exploration process as well. And so I think the hard things are still hard, I guess, is maybe how I would put it. And a fear or a concern would be if the LLM provides too much out of the box in terms of decisions that are being made, does it actually prevent you from finding the orthogonal shape? Now, you can use that to your advantage and say, great, I wanted to generate three alternatives and then see which of these feels good. And I've done that before, too. But, yeah, I think it definitely does not absolve you of making hard product decisions.
47:37And, in fact, it's important that you do so. It's like it's more important. Yeah.
47:40Alex Heath:I feel that in my work, which is not even just building software, but just building media is I could give myself over to Claude more and I could just let the skill file hopefully like reminded of what I like and all that stuff. But then I do that and then I really read it and I'm like, ah, like, and I'm talking to it like I would talk to a reporter when I was an editor in a newsroom. Yeah. And I feel like that's more important now as it gets more capable because I don't want to lose like my intuition in the process. I feel like a lot of people maybe are with how coding has taken off or starting to maybe give in a little too much to it.
48:15Alex Heath:And I hope that we kind of shift back towards that. I think the human instinct is, I like the reporter editor piece. Unless the reporter has like really gone off the rails. I imagine most of the time the editor is like, okay, this is like 90 % close to what I want. And maybe with some edits, I'll get to 95. Or maybe it's like 80 to 85, right? versus if you're seeking it from the beginning, you might try to get closer to 100%, right? Not that these things are perfectly measurable. I have that experience building even within labs where I've learned now that it's much better if I sort of hash things out with Claude and much more of a conversation before it writes a line of code and then say, all right, this feels good.
48:58Like we've collaborated effectively on a spec and now go and implement the spec versus if I just give it the high-level feature, it will build the feature. It will work. all the verification stuff we're building will mean that it functionally works and then i'll look at it and be like i would have done that a little bit differently but now it's done and now you know and i don't like that feeling of it being like it's a little hollow it's not quite yeah so like moving to a place where um somebody put it really well internally which is like the whole our whole job when coding with claude is like um expressing the north star with clarity and then helping you know make sure claude converges on that north star efficiently and effectively and like that is the role of a sort of guide slash in some ways manager although managers at least in software tend to be more on the like human development side so it's really uh architect there's not a great word i've found for it but it's that sort of sherpa of you know project and clawed towards that end versus expecting that one it's just going to do it out of the box um or two that you don't have a hand early and actually shaping that north star yeah i mean there's so many interesting
49:59Alex Heath:parallels with Instagram and a thing I remember you guys had suffered with a lot early and Facebook helped with was compute and like serving the app, right? And your servers, you didn't have the servers you needed. And there was a moment where like you had to do something. And that deal came together very fast. And now it's funny, like over a decade later, like compute is still the problem. And I imagine, you know, I know you're not working on compute directly, but I imagine compute is a thing you have to think about a lot internally in a way that you probably didn't envision when you decided to join a little AI lab two years ago?
50:29It was maybe two sort of vignettes that really illustrate it for me. One was in showing, like, you know, I've learned a lot in two years, but when 3.5 launched, you know, day of even, we're so much smaller than we are now, but day of, like, people were adopting it. We were starting to get, like, near, like, the, you know, like, fully maximizing our, like, whatever chips we had allocated to at the time. And I remember asking the Infra team, like, great. So what do we do when we're out? Do we just add capacity? Because in my world, from the Instagram days, unless you were doing some very specialized hardware on AWS, there was more hardware out there to do.
51:07And they're like, no, no, no. When we run out of this, that's it. Those are all the GPUs fully allocated. And yes, we're working on getting more. And I was like, oh, this is a very different environment. Because you can't just, it was naive, right? You can't just hit new instance and do that. And so that's -
51:24Alex Heath:Hence you guys apparently going to space with Elon. Exactly, right? Yeah, and finding new sources of, unexpected sources of compute. But that was a very quick lesson learned. I learned to internalize that immediately. But yeah, we think a lot about, you know, even within a given product, you don't want to sacrifice intelligence. So how do you deliver as much of that as possible without being sort of wasteful on computer, being thoughtful about what you do asynchronously, or being thoughtful about when you need the biggest model versus small. So it is a it is a consideration and I think it's a healthy one for a bunch of reasons, but I think it also brings us closer to the you were talking about customers before.
52:00You know, they're operating in a world where they're buying tokens effectively and then reselling it in some, you know, sort of product. And I think we're very aligned with them in a lot of ways in wanting to make sure that that's a healthy ecosystem for people. So you've seen a bigger shift towards token based sort of or usage based pricing. that has been a shift over the last year. I remember looking at, you know, the ecosystem a year ago and saying, look, our customers want to charge more or they want to deliver more value and they're kind of constrained by their current pricing models. And now so many more of them are able to actually deliver on intelligence or at least make it customizable, right?
52:39Where you can say, great, I'm trying to optimize for cost. I'm going to use like less frontier model, but know that I'm going to get this value or I really want to get this done. I'm going to use fast mode. I'm going to burn tokens, but it's because I have like that, that knob that I can, that I can tune. But yeah, compute definitely way more of a consideration here than, than IG. But in a similar way, like Instagram had felt like, and probably it was if you do the math, like exponential growth, at least.
53:03Alex Heath:Yeah, Dario said you guys had like a 80X Q1 in terms of cloud code. I don't know if Instagram had 80X Q4s. No, I think we've definitely, I mean, other than maybe week one, right? Yeah. From 100 to 100 ,000, we, but yeah, it's, you know, We had steady, very good percentage growth, but nothing like this. We can land it here. I mean, you've been very early at Anthropic. I mean, I say early. It's been two years, but that is early in AI world. And I think the culture of Anthropic is very fascinating, and it's something that I've been learning more as I spend more time with the people in the company.
53:35Alex Heath:And I think people look at the headlines. They look at Mythos. They look at how Dario talks about maybe 50 % of jobs will go away. And a lot of people are, oh, they're just fear mongering or there's like there's tactics here that are about regulatory capture, all these things. The culture is very unique, I find. And I'm curious to hear from you. Is there if you could identify a disconnect between how a lot of people externally perceive what you guys do and how people internally believe about what you're doing? Is there something there that you could put your finger on? It's a hard thing to convince people of because I can say all day, like, we are like a profoundly transparent company.
54:14Like when we say things, we are saying what we think, right? And Dario, probably more so than any person I've ever met, like speaks his mind, not in a calculated, oh, this will like help me fundraise. And like that, I've just like having gotten to know him and seen him operate both internally and externally, like it is not the sort of motivating force behind like the communications or the rollout strategy. Of course, it's one thing to say that and it's another thing to live that. But I mean, I think if it's a helpful like illustration, even internally, you know, this year has been great from commercial growth, like great from usage growth, et cetera.
54:51But I think the reason the company has stayed grounded is that the point of Anthropic is not to build a large commercial enterprise. The point of Anthropic is to, you know, do our best to nudge the world towards a good future with AI. And once you see everything through that lens, like it explains all the downstream decisions. Now, I can't ask people not to be cynical. It's outside. So ultimately, we'll have to continue to hopefully demonstrate to our actions that we're not trying to fearmonger or we're not trying to hold things back because we think it'll be perceived as more frontier. I guess maybe I'll illustrate one thing, which is the internal belief is we should be able to release a mythos class model safely.
55:34And the fact that we haven't yet is bad. We're not proud of it. It's that if we do it right, then all of the positive use cases can be had as well. You know, we talked about life sciences earlier. There's definitely some interesting things that could happen in mythos there. Like I built a lot of software using mythos internally. It's really good at it. Like there's always no cybersecurity risk for your internal software.
55:56Alex Heath:Right, exactly. Well, actually, we've like figured out how to like, you know, do it as safely as possible. But like that is how we see the world, right? Like we want to usher. We want to give people these capabilities. We don't want to like hold them back. And we're working really hard so that that's not the case. So, you know, it'll be a prove it. I think that's fair enough. But like it does, you know, when I see people like, oh, they're just trying to like inflate their next valuation or they're like trying to make themselves sound cool or they don't really believe this. Like that is to the extent that you believe me, that is not like the motivating force internally.
56:33But again, I think it's a our journey is to show that over time.
56:36Alex Heath:Okay, lastly, when people come to you, especially because you work at Anthropic and they say, Mike, I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about my family member, my kid, my grandparent, their economic security. What do you tell them? I don't tell them not to be worried because I think that there are going to be big shifts. You know, we don't know exactly how fast. You can disagree on the timeline, but it is already shifting and happening. And I get actually a whole class of email that I've gotten recently is parents of college grads, like people I know, either socially or professionally, who have kids who are graduating.
57:12And what do we do? What do we do? And I think the thing that I tell people, which is what I believe, is that it is not one company or one sort of branch of government is going to solve this. It's going to take the kind of sort of societal level conversation. If there's anything that we've been trying to do, it has been to try to spark that conversation. Again, it gets read as fear-mongering sometimes. Whether that's everything ranging from figuring out different tax structures, reskilling. It's actually going to take all of these things. I think one of the things that you've seen from us as being more specific about what some of those policy proposals might look like.
57:50This is a long answer that I would tell somebody, but it's a complicated question. But yeah, I think what I tell folks is you're not alone. and this is a shared kind of complicated thing. I think the things that will still remain human and ineffable and important are still relationships and curiosity and creativity and the ability to organize people towards an end. Like that's still gonna be really, really important. I don't see AI like replacing that anytime soon to the extent that that's a skill that you can pick up or at least develop or at least continue to nurture. I think that's really, really important.
58:21And then also not get as, like things will continue to shift. So even if in the current moment with all the uncertainty, maybe, you know, our friend's kid doesn't land in exactly the job that they wanted, things will continue to shift. Like nothing is set in stone. And I think if people remain sort of curious and actively exploring what the frontier looks like, they might then either be part of creating a whole new category of jobs or progressing to a different place in their own companies. Like I think the landscape is still going to continue to shift. So not treating the current moment as uncertain as and in some cases challenging as it is, is like a static thing that will lock people in.
59:00Alex Heath:All right. Mike, I'll let you get back to the lab. Thanks for doing this. Great to see you. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Don't go anywhere. After the break, Ellis is joining me to recap my conversation with Mike and talk about how old we are.
59:16Alex Heath:This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.
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1:00:17Alex Heath:And we're back. Surprise. It's me, the Hamburger Helper, here with Alex Heath to discuss an event I was not at for a variety of extemporaneous, extenuating, spontaneous circumstances that may or may not involve founder clients and two-year-olds. But I'm very jealous that you got to go. How was your trip? It was good. I feel bad for you that you can't do the Burbank TestFO day trip every week like I do. It's something that I wish on everyone. Just kidding. But no, this was great. It was great to go. This was Anthropic's second developer conference that they've ever done. And the scale of it kind of maps to how Anthropic has grown.
1:01:02Alex Heath:So I didn't go last year, but it was only a couple hundred people. And Anthropic has now obviously become like the fastest growing company of all time, you know, value around a trillion dollars. And this was like 2000 people with three satellite events and like different cities. And I think they'll probably go even bigger next year. So it's actually kind of cool to just see this culture of this company. The events are this really cool physical manifestation of how these companies are changing and evolving, especially in tech. I mean, gosh, I just finished with therapy 30 minutes ago. So now I can borrow some language and say, can we just pause and sit with that for a second?
1:01:44Alex Heath:How far Anthropic has come in just a year? Oh, this is good. So you should always do therapy before we record. Yeah. Because it's an absolute 180, is it not? I mean, gosh, I feel like OpenAI was just absolutely unassailable in terms of momentum, product. And now all these companies are kind of seemingly trying to focus, bring back maybe some of the apps they built over the last year that were distracting them from gains as the market enters turmoil. So much has changed. I feel like with the vibe, there's been a vibe shift, one may say. There has. And Anthropic is causing the turmoil. So I think they feel pretty good.
1:02:24Alex Heath:But it was also kind of interesting. I saw a lot of chatter on social media about people like the day before seeing the Claude with Code conference signage going up in SF going like, wait, this is happening. Like people also didn't know that this was happening. And it was also reflected in the reporters who were there. There were the, you know, typical, you know, the tech reporters that I see all the time at these events. But I was amazed at all of the publications that did not have people there. And it was clearly just like not on their radar that, you know, maybe the hottest company in the world.
1:02:55Alex Heath:Certainly the most influential tech company right now was doing this big event with their co-founders. And, you know, Dario and Daniela were there and did a chat and all of that. And the headlines poked through because of the Elon thing where they announced that they were working with Elon on compute. But other than that, I don't know if this would have really poked through into the mainstream. Like I'm sure Anthropic hoped it would have. Most importantly, where do all the reporters sit now? I've always been a goody two shoes sitting at the front of the class. So back when I was reporting, I used to sit at the front right next to our old friend, Josh Constein from TechCrunch.
1:03:32Alex Heath:Where do you sit these days? They put you in a press room, you know, to kind of toil away, away from the normal attendees, right? Because part of that is they also don't want you interacting with the non-press attendees as much as possible. So you have to work harder for the scoops. The creators don't have any hard questions, don't poison their minds. But no, it was very nice. The Anthropic folks did a great job. The food was actually quite good, which it usually is not at these events. So I give them props there. And they did have reserved seats for us in the keynote, which I always appreciate.
1:04:07Alex Heath:It's nice to still get something as a member of the media these days. One of the other reasons I missed it, I was thinking back to my interview, which we can bring up on screen for those watching on video with Mike Krieger back in 2013, I think. Oh, wow. Just kind of a crazy amount of time ago, 13 years ago. 2013? Yes. They must have just gotten bought. Yeah. Yeah. Just acquired by Fartbook. And he has a quote about the last year being crazy because Instagram grew from 30 million users to 100 million users. Just incredible. And he's talking about how as Instagram grows, he goes, we got to think about the world here.
1:04:54Alex Heath:We got to optimize for a lot of phones. Not everybody has an iPhone 5. And it's just like, wow, so much has changed. Man, of course you beat me because he and I started before we were recording, reminiscing. And the last time I did something on camera with him for like a podcast type thing was in 2018. And it was for the New York office opening of Instagram. And it was the year before Kevin Systrom and Mike, the two co-founders, very dramatically, I'm sure you remember that, dramatically left Facebook, right? Over like the power clash with Zuck. If you would have told both of us where we'd be in 2018, I mean, Mike, you're a little bit more accomplished, but, But it was definitely wild to think back to that.
1:05:37Alex Heath:So this is funny. I'm actually looking at the URL for the article right now. It was almost exactly 13 years ago. It was May 13th. And when this episode airs, it's going to be May 14th. Yeah. So that would have been a funny coinkydink. It makes you feel old, doesn't it? Yeah. And that's the segue into my next question. uh well it wasn't really a question but now i have a question so i know that mike since he's been back at anthropic and just recently has kind of you know let go of the reins for the chief product officer now is kind of back to an ic role i feel like that's always kind of the dream for a lot of engineers but i was also reading back in this in this interview i did with him that he was talking about waking up around 2 p.m and coding until 6 a.m is he still in that mode or is this a different type of IC mode now being the world's most famous co-founder emeritus.
1:06:32Alex Heath:Right. I mean, Mike is looking very healthy and well-rusted. So I would be shocked if he was doing that still. But who knows, man, a lot can happen these days. Like with modern advances in health technology, you can do a lot. It's a very different job though, isn't it? I mean, I just appreciate like he's always been a very kind, humble guy. And I also interacted with him a bit when he was on the board at the browser company when I was there for a couple of years. And he's just kind of a real one, I think. And it's fun to see people in that position who, frankly, have all the money in the world, just kind of want to get back to work and help work on some skunk work stuff and actually be able to bring the urgency that in some ways only founders can if they can retain that energy, you know?
1:07:19Alex Heath:And I was talking with the Anthropic comms team too about this. He's also like the dream spokesperson for a company, especially a company like Anthropic, because he is, you know, legit, he's personable, he's charismatic. He'll go and talk about things, right. That may be considered passe for, you know, maybe you're more of cerebral, you know, AI co-founders to talk about. But at the same time, he can say a lot without saying too much. And that's a rare skill. And he's very good at that. Well, did he say too much when he made the Instagram first Snapchat comparison? No, I think that's great. I think that's like, that's podcast gold, right?
1:08:01Alex Heath:I think... Of course it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did the PR people bite their nails? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, he, you saw how the way he reacted to Figma, which was, you know, uh, very diplomatic. I had to ask him about that situation for, and you know, I don't know. Mike's good. He's good at what he does. Uh, and he's a great interviewee. Um, and I really appreciated the time with him. I think it was nice to get into his head and hear kind of the areas that Anthropic is exploring next. That was the goal for me because, you know, we talked about this, like if the team he's on, the last big thing they did was literally clawed code, literally the thing that has made Anthropic the most valuable company in the world.
1:08:47Alex Heath:That's a tremendous amount of pressure. And even for the co-founder of Instagram, that's a lot of pressure. And so I wanted to hear the areas he was exploring. And I do feel like he gave us a lot of good detail on that, which I appreciated. Yeah. Now that it's been a little bit of time between the interview, what do you feel like you've been thinking about the most and connecting the dots in your sources, personal knowledge management system? What are the big themes? Right. I need Mike to build me that. I think that what I've been thinking about is it's clear that health is a thing they're going to go into next.
1:09:21Alex Heath:So if you were an investor type, you would short all the health stocks, right? Given how things have gone with, uh, Claude design and Figma or what have you, uh, it's very clear they're focused on health. There were two things he said that really stuck out to me about Anthropics culture, which I think is very unique. And I think people discount how unique it is and how much it drives the decisions Anthropics makes. Um, but he said at one point that the point of the company is not to build a large, you know, commercial enterprise, which is ironic given that it's the fastest growing commercial entity of all time, but to quote nudge the world towards a good future with AI.
1:10:00Alex Heath:I think there's reasons to shine a light on that and a magnifying glass and go, well, like, okay, then how does that make sense partnering with Elon or the department of war stuff or whatever? But I do think a lot of people, the vast majority of people inside Anthropic do feel that it, I was talking about this actually with another senior leader there just off the record that day, that the culture of Anthropic really reminds me of Apple in a lot of ways, the good and the bad. It has the good of really focusing on the craft, the commitment to detail, the world building, the kind of reality distortion field of what's going on, the focus on product.
1:10:41Alex Heath:But also you get a little bit of that chip on your shoulder, a little bit of that reality distortion field, which can also, you know, potentially be negative. And it has a bit of a insular culture like Apple, where it's very much like you're in, I don't want to say cold, but it is kind of like a cold, like you're in it or you're not, and you get it or you don't. It's not really like a normal big tech company can just employ, can just show up to Anthropic and necessarily succeed. So I thought that was interesting. Well, what do you think that's due to? I mean, I'm a believer in kind of two schools of thought.
1:11:15Alex Heath:One is heavily documenting very specific beliefs and philosophy. And I think they've done that better than anybody else. I mean, I feel like I have like three to four browser tabs open that I just can't seem to make time for that are all the different essays that they've written. I think the most recent one was kind of like teaching Claude why. It's been a lot of great stuff. They had the Constitution, obviously Dario's essays. But then on the other hand, it all just still comes back to people hire people like them. And it just comes back to the top and the founders, you know, hiring people all the way down.
1:11:50Alex Heath:I think that's what it is. I think it's very much a safety aligned culture. And the culture interview part of the hiring process is very serious. It's way more intense than most companies. I know they have some very specific questions to... They ask things about like, what are the hardest like, like moral tradeoffs you've had to make? Like, when have you, you know, put your morals ahead of like financial gain? Would you be willing to do that at Anthropic? That kind of thing. Did you ever go to detention in middle school? And if so, why? Right, right. But yeah, I mean, the culture, the culture is super unique.
1:12:26Alex Heath:And it's probably a rare thing for someone like Mike to come in and succeed in a culture like that because he was, you know, in the Facebook machine for so long. And, uh, he joined, you know, two, almost two years ago, two years ago, which is an eternity in AI, especially for anthropic anthropic was like not on the map really at all two years ago. So he obviously saw something and made a bet on something that he didn't need to make a bet on. Cause he's, you know, he's the fricking co-founder of Instagram. Like he doesn't need to do anything, but he clearly saw that there was something happening here.
1:12:59Alex Heath:And yeah, not that he needed another break, but he certainly got one. I mean, it's a testament to him, too, just that he stayed in touch with everything happening in the world and in culture, which isn't always or maybe even usually the case for people who've kind of been around and had such big success. I mean, I appreciated, you know, his recognition of kind of like the distribution challenges of building product today. Like back in the old days, Facebook had 15 minutes of time per day that you had to compete with, you know, and now it's an hour from TikTok and it's the most addictive content format ever created.
1:13:39Alex Heath:And he's clearly still plugged in, which I really genuinely appreciate. You know, you meet you meet founders or people in this industry all the time who may even celebrate not being in touch anymore, just kind of moving beyond it, you know, whether it's with politics or otherwise. And it seems like he's retained that, even going to the point of rebuilding bourbon from scratch, which was really fun, and then coming away from it with an actually cool insight, which is that even though it helped us build it so quickly, I think he said something along the lines of, like, if you just use LLMs for everything, it might actually prevent you from finding the surprising or non-obvious or culturally edgy things that might make a product work.
1:14:24Alex Heath:Certainly speaking of Snapchat, I mean, what AI in the world would have ever suggested that ephemerality was going to be the solution to the pressures of social media? Like, that was just a crazy one. And every single person said Evan was wrong about that until it started working. No, I mean, his point about how human intuition and relationships and creativity become more valuable, I think was really good to hear. And I do agree with that. And I think the people who are really plugged in on AI and where it's going are all saying that. And it was good to hear that from him. I don't know if you also caught, he's, he's very focused on distribution still, uh, having built something that obviously has tremendous distribution, billions of users with Instagram.
1:15:03Alex Heath:I thought his thing about, uh, I don't know if you caught this, like MCP is a distribution mechanism was interesting, like an MCP leaderboard and hearing from partners, uh, on MCP that, you know, they get tremendous, you know, inflow of traffic via MCP if Anthropic features them. So it's almost like this new app store model being created, where instead of downloading apps, you're in an MCP store or something. I could see them productizing that as well. It sounded like he was really focused on that. And that's his consumer mindset, right? Being brought to bear on AI. Yeah. I'm trying to picture what that might look like.
1:15:39Alex Heath:And I mean, if MCP turns everything into a pipe and there's a lot of competition, then the fundamentals underlying those pipes, whether it has to do with the fees that you get charged by platform or even to send a transaction are just going to get lower and lower, I think, which is definitely a good thing for consumers. Obviously, the moats are very thin, and we'll see what happens to venture capital and consequentially to myself as a result of that. But yeah, it seems like... I think storytelling is going to be all right, Ellis. That's my takeaway of the last one or so. I just feel like everyone feels that way.
1:16:15Alex Heath:I think marketers and CMOs and brand people are going to become more valuable because that's how you're going to stand out. You know, when anyone can make anything, that's what matters. I guess that's why our friends at TPBN are over at OpenAI now. Have you chatted with them? How are they feeling being back in the slack of a big company? I need to check in with John and Jordy about their ex-views cratering since the deal and see how they're feeling about that. That's a good reminder. But yeah, no, look, man, this was a great episode with Mike. Bummed you couldn't do it with me, Ellis, when we were actually charting out early guests that we wanted to have on the show.
1:16:54Alex Heath:Mike was someone you put forward that you wanted. So I tried to do you right and ask a few of your questions you sent me. I don't know if you caught one of them. I did. He took a moment and said, that's a really good question when I said it was Ellis' question. Which one? It was the one about his lab being a broader structure for companies in general. Yeah. You know, these like these founder lean, you know, based companies that don't have a ton of, you know, rank and file. The answer was basically yes, of course. But that's that's the future, man. No, all I sees. I'm picturing in 50 years, we have 500 ,000 clones of Brian Chesky that are all spitting up$1 billion companies simultaneously with a fleet of AI agents.
1:17:45Alex Heath:I mean, Brian's cool. Come on the pod, Brian. But Brian? He's got that New York hustler mindset, tone, body. Who's the perfect Apex founder these days? I feel like a lot of people say it's him. You heard it straight from Ellis, folks. How could any of us compete? Well, this episode will be dropping the day that we're having our live show and launch party at Notions headquarters with the COF Substack, Chris Bass. Ellis, do you have your toast for the room prepared? Have you written a speech? Oh, Jesus. No, but I did buy the suitcase. You told me to get an away suitcase instead of my radio travel pro, so I did upgrade.
1:18:29Alex Heath:Good. And I did get some nothing headphone A ear cans so I could look cool on the plane as well. Oh, yeah. Shout out, Carl. So, yeah, I'm trying to pump myself up. I'm excited to have several former guests there. And it's going to be a great group and hope we can do more live stuff down the road. But yeah. Hopefully they show up instead of just talking to their agents. Yeah. I mean, that's the one thing I think that may last in AIs is events. because what is the joy of sending your agent to an event? You can't taste the drinks that we've creatively named. You can't have the apps, the past apps that will be delicious.
1:19:07Alex Heath:You can't hear the DJ will have. You can't potentially meet your future partner. What kind of partner are you talking about? Business or love partner, either one. That would be sweet. That'd be quite an accomplishment if we had people making out on the dance floor at our party. That'd be awesome. We'll see. All right, well, should we wrap it there? And that's it for this week's show. Thanks to Mike for coming on. If you like the show, don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We are access.showonline. It's where you can find all of our links. And you can find us in video, lovely high definition at accesspod on YouTube.
1:19:44Alex Heath:If you really like this episode, we'd love a five-star review or even share with a friend or agent. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company for your startup storytelling needs as long as they remain relevant. I think they will. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and this show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye!
1:20:10Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise
1:20:22to a stay surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking.ye. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at$50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more. Whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder, The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. Shop Labor Day savings at The Home Depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.
From the publisher
Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, on what Anthropic is building after Claude Code.
Alex sits down with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and head of Anthropic Labs, to talk about what the team is working on after Claude Code and where AI is headed next. They discuss how Anthropic's skunkworks lab actually operates, why Mike stepped down as CPO to go back to building, and what the competition with OpenAI's Codex really looks like from the inside. They also get into the white spaces Mike is most excited about, why human creativity becomes more valuable as AI gets better, and what Anthropic's culture has in common with Apple.
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