Benjamin Mann: preference

Transcript context

…That's amazing. I don't know how you do it. I'd be extremely stressed. I'm going to try this resting in motion strategy. Okay, so you've been at Anthropic for a long time. From the very beginning I was reading there were 7 employees back in 2020. Today there's over 1,000, I don't know what the latest number is, but I know it's over 1,000. I've heard also that you've done basically every job at Anthropic, you made big contributions to a lot of the core products, the brand, the team hiring. Let me just ask I guess what's most changed over that period? What is most different from the beginning days and which of those jobs that you've had over the years have you most loved? I probably had 15 different roles, honestly. I was head of security for a bit. I managed the Ops team when our president was on mat leave, I was crawling around under tables, plugging in HDMI cords and doing pen testing on our building. And I started our product team from scratch and convinced the whole company that we needed to have a product instead of just being a research company. Yeah, it's been a lot. All of it very fun. I think my favorite role in that time has been when I started the labs team about a year ago, whose fundamental goal was to do transfer from research to end user products and experiences. Because fundamentally I think the way that Anthropic can differentiate itself and really win is to be on the cutting edge. We have access to the latest, greatest stuff that's happening and I think honestly through our safety research we have a big opportunity to do things that no other company can safely do. For example, with computer use, I think that's going to be our huge opportunity basically to make it possible for an agent to use all your credentials on your computer, there has to be a huge amount of trust and to me we need to basically solve safety to make that happen. Safety and alignment. I'm pretty bullish on that kind of thing and I think we're going to see really cool stuff coming out soonish. Yeah, just leading that team has been so fun. MCP came out of that team and Claude Code came out of that team. And the people who I hired are like combo, have been a founder and also have been at big companies and seeing how things work at scale. It's just been an incredible team to work with and figure out the future with. I want to hear more about this. Team actually the person that connected us, the reason we're doing this is a mutual friend colleague Raph Lee who I used to work with at Airbnb now works on this team, leads a lot of this work and so he wanted me to make sure I asked about this team because... I didn't realize all these things came out that team. Holy moly. What else should people know about this team? It used to be called Labs, I think it's called Frontiers now.…

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