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Published · transcript-backed

Diane Penn: belief

26 Jul 2026 Lenny's Podcast Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Penn

“Now that that's improved a bit, then it's, well, now it's these other areas actually become more of the rough edges. And so I think we're in one of those moments worth writing where we need to actually just focus and prioritize on training the models to be great at this area.”

— Diane Penn

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Diane Penn
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
26 Jul 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Why do you think AI is not great at writing? My guess is it has studied all of the best writing in all of humanity. It's figured out, here's the best way to write. And there's only so many ways to write. And so we've just recognized, okay, this is what AI does. It has these tropes. Is that the core of it? Is there something else that's keeping it from being a great writer? Ironically, being a large language model of all things, you think you'd be really great at language. I think part of it is also we need to invest more in training improvements to make AI continuously strong on areas like writing. I think it's also the technology's jagged-edged, like we mentioned. So sometimes when the models were good at writing, but not agentic, our thesis is: how do we make the models more agentic or call the right tools? Now that that's improved a bit, then it's, well, now it's these other areas actually become more of the rough edges. And so I think we're in one of those moments worth writing where we need to actually just focus and prioritize on training the models to be great at this area. And that is a very active area for us. So fun that you mentioned. Okay. I'm glad. I'm glad. And also it was going to be interesting once AI is so good, we're like, "I don't know who wrote that." But to your point, sometimes we actually want to know that it's AI. That's really interesting. I never thought of it that way. The other interesting part of this is that there's that comedian who was joking that we're on a plane and the WiFi's down and we're just like, "What the hell? The WiFi's not working on this plane. This sucks. How dare you?" When you're in a tube in the sky flying like a bird. And how dare you complain that the WiFi doesn't work? Your point is there's so much advancement and so much power. We can't fix it all. We can't make it all work the best possible and so basically writing has been not the priority, and it feels like there's more investment happening there.…

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