Things I learned at Anthropic

I left Anthropic and joined OpenAI.

I know for sure that Anthropic will never be the place like the one that I started at, and I myself changed a lot too. I joined as a front-end engineer ~two years ago when there were ~60 people and left as a researcher when there were >500. Things I learned: 

1. The pace of a team’s progress is largely a function of its decisiveness and open-mindedness to take risky bets.  

2. Every time you train a new model there will be an inevitable brain damage that needs to be solved and often you can reverse engineer the issue by carefully looking at the data.  

3. The simplest and dumbest approach will often just work. 

4. You have to go through the entire journey of full understanding to arrive to the simplest answer. 

5. When technology is so transformative, it’s your job to tell customers what they need to do with it to solve their problems. 

6. Scaling the company’s culture requires fostering internal champions for your core values.  

7. In research, the beauty often lies in taking experimental ideas and making them work on a larger scale. In product engineering, the beauty lies in refining a visionary design idea to its most essential form you can execute within given constraints. 

8. Early bad hires will have 10x effects as the company grows. It is more heartbreaking when the organization is blind to this (e.g. they don’t let go and rather allow them to influence a lot of important decisions) 

9. Being the first design-oriented person is challenging and often you will end up teaching people how to think rather than doing things. But you can learn a great deal about fundraising and product strategies by continually making cool demos and slides. 

10. Evaluations are going to be an inevitable part of the story for your product. You can help academia by adopting their evaluations in your model card, and that’s the position of power that is really important to recognize responsibly. 

11. I learned to become comfortable taking leaps of faith, even when feeling uncertain, as this is often necessary when the company goes through a hypergrowth. Not being afraid to jump into unknown problems, taking more responsibilities, and doing 200% more than what is asked for is how I personally grew the most.   

12. Unique writing cultures shape how ideas take place. 

13. Playing a catch up game is efficient. 

14. Doing good work and being kind to people you collaborate with is how I built the most meaningful friendships in my life.

    

    Building Claude 3 w/ friends ❤️

I hope that with every project I’ve worked on at Anthro, be it a research tool, a UI, a paper, or a shipped Claude model, will carry all the love and care I put in. I’m equally, if not more, excited to continue working on AGI at OpenAI. I’m very grateful to everyone who has supported me through this transition.

The Dance Class by Edgar Degas, 1874