Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)

I had this notion coming in, yes, these models are great. They're going to be able to produce code, they're going to be able to write, hopefully in your voice eventually. But are they able to have an independent opinion? And it's actually really flipped for me only in the last month and only with Opus 4, where my go to product strategy partner is Claude...it really went out for a while and it came back and I was like, damn, you really looked at it in a new way. And so that's a thing that I've...creativity and novelty of thought relative to how I'm thinking about things.

We have this breakfast with the kids every morning. And sometimes some question will come up, like something about physics in our oldest kid is six. But they ask funny questions about the solar system or physics in a six year old way. And before we reach for Claude. Cause at first my instinct is, oh, I wonder how Claude will do this question. And we started changing, well, how would we find out? And the answer can't just be ask, Claud.

I think the role of engineering has changed a lot, but the kind of suite of people that come together to produce a product has yet. And I think for the worse in a lot of ways because I think we're still holding on assumptions. We had to completely re-architect it because so much more code was being written and so many more pull requests were being submitted that it just completely blew out the expectations of it. A lot of things that I'm thinking about right now is, how do I provide the minimum viable strategy to let people feel empowered to go run and prototype and build and explore at the edge of model capabilities.

The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Cloud code team because they're using Cloud code to build Cloud code in a very self-improving kind of way. And early on that project they would do very line by line pull request reviews in the way that you would for any other project. And they've just realized Cloud is generally right and it's producing pull requests that are probably larger than most people are going to be able to review. So can you use a different Cloud to review it and then do the human almost like acceptance testing more than trying to review line by line.

If any for shipping things that could have been built by anybody just using our models off the shelf...where we should play and what we can do uniquely should be stuff that's really at that magic intersection between the two. We need to be in that fine-tuning process. So so much of what, if you look at what we're working on right now, what we've shipped recently between research and all these other things, are things that we. The functional unit of work at Anthropic is no longer take the model and then go work with design and product to go ship a product.

I think there's still value, a lot of value in two things. One is making this all comprehensible. I think we've done okay job. I think we could do a much better job of making this comprehensible. Well, it's still the difference between somebody who's really adept at using these tools in their work and most people is huge...strategy, how we win, where we'll play. Figuring out where exactly you're going to want of all the things that you could be spending your time or your tokens or your computation on what, what, what you want to actually go and do.

Things that feel defensible or durable, one is understanding of a particular market. I spend a bunch of time with the Harvey folks and they really showed me some of their UI. I was like what, what is this thing? They're like, oh this is a really specific flow that lawyers do and you never would have come up with it from scratch. And it's not like you could argue about whether it's the optimal way they get things done, but it is the way that they get things done. And here's how AI can help with that. And so differentiated industry knowledge, biotech.