Diane Penn: commitment

Transcript context

…No. So this was actually up for about 24 hours or so. We had just published one of our early interpretability research in early 2024. And one of the examples was essentially you could have what's called features of the model within the layers, which express certain types of thematics. So one of the themes that the researchers was able to identify was, let's say, bullet point writing. Another one was people and places. And one that really came up frequently that resonated was the Golden Gate Bridge. And so when you actually essentially dialed up that feature, Claude would obsess about the Golden Gate Bridge. So meaning in every one of its responses, it would come back and talk about the Golden Gate Bridge. So if you said like, "Give me a recipe for making spaghetti," it would say, " Here is a recipe and the orange color is just like international red that the Golden Gate Bridge looked like." And so it was really quirky. And we very much wanted to, in that situation, just bring it to the masses and bring it to people who were starting to use Claude. And so the entire experience actually we spun up on our Claude.ai website within 24 hours. And that took engineering, product, design, our research teams all working together. And we were really, really proud of it. I think it maybe reached only 2,000 people, to be honest. But it made us feel like, oh, we can actually bring new user experiences, showcase our research in a way that's different and authentic to us. And in a very startup be like pace. That to me was one of those maybe hidden inflection points of we were starting to find our identity, that we could build products, build experiences that were different from what our competitors had seen, what was already out there. And I think that obviously Labs, Claude Code, et cetera, we then started to identify ourselves as would we actually think the world, how to think about AI, how to bring that closer to the public. But it was a very bottoms-up culture. And so that entire experience was very bottoms up. I see engineers, I see designers donating time to work on. And so I like to always use that as an example of what the early days were like. But the culture and the values have very much, I think, stayed the same since those early days. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. What are some of the other big inflection moments as you think about just Anthropic going from just this lab that's trying to compete with this juggernaut of OpenAI at that point to what it is today? What are some moments that stick out of like, wow, that really changed things?…

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