Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. You should, at some point, have Chris Olah on the podcast, because he's just the industry expert on this. He invented this field of we call it mechanistic interpretability. And the idea is at its core what is your brand? What is it? It's a bunch of neurons that are connected. And so, what you can do is in a human brain or in an animal brain, you can study it at this mechanistic level to understand what the neurons are doing. It turns out surprisingly a lot of this does translate to models also. So, model neurons are not the same as animal neurons, but they behave similarly in a lot of ways. And so, we've been able to learn just a ton about the way these neurons work, about this layer or this neuron maps to this concept, how particular concepts are encoded, how the model does planning, how it thinks ahead. A long time ago we weren't sure if the model was just predicting the next token, or is doing something a little bit deeper. Now I think there's actually quite strong evidence that it is doing something a little bit deeper. And then the structures that let it do this are pretty sophisticated now where as the models get bigger it's not just a single neuron that corresponds to a concept. A single neuron might correspond to a dozen concepts, and if it's activated together with other neurons this is called super position. And together it represents this more sophisticated concept. And it's just something we're learning about all the time. And for Anthropic as we think about the way this space evolves doing this in a way that is safe and good for the world is just this is the reason that we exist, and this is the reason that everyone is at Anthropic. Everyone that is here, this is the reason why they're here. So, a lot of this work we actually open source. We publish it a lot. And we publish very freely to talk about this just so we can inspire other labs that are working on similar things to do it in a way that's safe. And this is something we've been doing for Claude Code also. We call this, "The race to the top" internally. And so, for Claude Code, for example, we released an open source sandbox. And this is a sandbox they can run the agent in, and just make sure that there's certain boundaries and they can't access, like, everything on your system. And we made that open source, and it actually works with any agent, not just Claude Code, because we wanted to make it really easy for others to do the same thing. So, this is just the same principle of race to the top. We want to make sure this thing goes well, and this is the lever that we have. Incredible. Okay. I definitely want to spend more time on that. I will follow up with this suggestion. Something else that I've been noticing in the field across engineers and product managers, others that work with agents is there's this anxiety people feel when their agents aren't working. There's a sense that [inaudible 00:59:57] has a question [inaudible 00:59:58] answer, or it's, like, blocked on something, or, "There's all this productivity I'm losing. I need to wake up and get it going again." Is that something you feel? Is that something your team feels? Do you feel like this is a problem we need to track and think about? I always have a bunch of agents running. So, at the moment I have five agents running. And, at any moment, I wake up and I start a bunch of agents. Like, the first thing I did when I woke up was like, "Oh, man. I really want to check this thing." So, I opened up my phone Claude iOS app code tab." Like, agent, do blah, blah, blah. Because I wrote some code yesterday and I was like, "Wait. Did I do this right?" I was double guessing something, and it was correct. But now it's just so easy to do this. So, I don't know. There is this little bit of anxiety maybe. I, personally, haven't really felt it just because I have agents running all the time. And I'm also just not locked into terminal anymore. Maybe a third of my code now is in the terminal, but also a third is using the desktop app. And then a third is the iOS app, which is just so surprising, because I did not think that this would be the way that I could even in 2026.…

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