Andy Booth

Making AI useful in the real world

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@AnthropicAI US Gov prevents judgement day. Neat

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

Fable is such an apt name given retail users will probably only ever hear stories about Mythos.

[bayes @bayeslord]

Imagine if they trained on all the art in the world and then didn’t even let artists make art with the models

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

This is where we are now...imagination is the new limiting factor

[Norgard @BrianNorgard]

If you can think it, you can build it.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

🤯

"We do not see hitting a wall.

This year will have a radical acceleration that surprises everyone.

Exponentials catch people off guard.

We are at the precipice of something incredible."

[Apoorv Agrawal @apoorv03]

Dario at MS TMT Conference today:

On defense / DOW:"We really believe in defending America." Anthropic has been working with the national security community for 2 years. "We are the most lean forward."

On AI acceleration:"We do not see hitting a wall. This year will have a radical acceleration that surprises everyone." Exponentials catch people off guard. "We are at the precipice of something incredible. We need to manage it the right way."

On where markets are wrong:"It's already big and it will get 1 million times bigger." The underestimation of exponential growth is the key thing people need to understand.

On revenue scale:Anthropic was at ~$100M run rate 2 years ago. Now at $19B run rate.

On culture — Dario says he spends 40% of his time on it:"Anyone who is CEO of a growing firm needs to realize they are chief culture officer. My job is to make sure everyone is on same page and believes in what we are doing. That's the most important thing." He does a vision quest with the whole company every couple weeks. "I want them to hear it directly from me. If I tell the CTO, who tells the VP Eng, who tells the manager — that's too long of a game of telephone." "Politics and infighting are a cancer to companies as they grow."

On talent retention vs Meta:"We lost 2 people to Meta. They lost several dozen. Normalized by size, they lost 10-20x more people vs us." Attributes this to unified culture generating "super linear returns — by working together vs working against each other."

On code as the breakout use case:Code has "exceeded our high expectations." Why? Devs adopt fast, code is verifiable, and gains compound — you build software to build software. "Didn't realize it would go so fast even at traditional enterprises." Frustration is around regulated industries where legal/compliance slow things down. "That's how fast everything could be going if not for non-AI barriers."

On Anthropic's own AI usage:Top internal use cases: 1) writing code, 2) the process around writing code (SWE), 3) managing servers and controlling clusters. "If we were paying ourselves for our usage, we'd be one of our largest customers."

On Claude Code:"You can supervise an army of 100 Claudes. It's closely analogous to a management skill." The people who are best at it keep the big picture in their head. Higher return to finding people who can handle more complex tasks.

On platform vs apps:"We are primarily a platform, but there are places where we have expertise to make something directly useful." Claude Code emerged as a tool they built for themselves — thousands of internal users before shipping it externally. "Code is a prelude for what we will see in everything else."

On societal implications:"Human history — lots of muddling through. We found ourselves in this comedy of errors and figured it out eventually. It's happening so fast that we need to do better than that this time." The market will deliver positive benefits — "I see that as priced in." What's not priced in: the choices we make around externalities. Jobs, national security, ensuring the benefits reach everyone.

On chips & compute:Anthropic uses multiple chip suppliers. "We find that actually using different chips is useful to us. Chips aren't just a speed number — we gain benefits from heterogeneity." Also standard business logic of having more than one supplier.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@beffjezos “Oh the sleep we lost with ‘just one more prompt’”!

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

🤔

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

5.4 sooner than you Think.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@thsottiaux That was mostly me 😀

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

This hit me after setting up an autonomous agent with @openclaw

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

We spent decades designing software for humans.

The next decade may be about designing software for agents.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

Just do stuff

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

The problem is that you don't know what you want to do, and figuring out what you want to do requires learning, experimentation, and effort - so you do nothing.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@thedankoe Couldn’t have said it any better. Experience is the only cure.

Just do stuff

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@mckaywrigley Very concerning, particularly the handling of this situation.

Another provider will come in without restrictions and the fears of this will be realised.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@ilyasut Great to see for now, although the future is bleak in this regard.

They will keep trying and eventually the answer will be yes.

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

Every time AI gets better, the bottleneck just moves somewhere else

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@LLMJunky AI made changelogs possible 👏

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@Yuchenj_UW 🫤

https://t.co/63YVYVZqpY

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

“Just a small change.”

Codex:

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@rohanvarma Me? Nothing!

Codex built an always-on trading desk that trades markets based on signals. It searches for edge anywhere it can find it.

Also, agentic swarms that review specs and build out test artefacts and automation code using Playwright.

Astonishing

[Andy Booth @ibanezvaio]

@elder_plinius Ruining my sleep schedule 😭