February 24, 2026
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41 min 3 sec
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Anthropic Sees Claude
Public opinion on LLMs like Claude varies widely—but how do the people who actually work at Anthropic think about it? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus to discuss his recent feature, which he reported from within Anthropic HQ. They discuss the piece, and then they hash out the real questions: What’s the correct literary metaphor for an LLM? Does an AI company really need psychologists for its chatbots? And, perhaps most importantly, should you be polite to Claude?
Show Notes
- That’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, and his latest piece is “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either.”
- The article on Google Brain that he reported a decade ago: “The Great A.I. Awakening.”
- To learn more about LessWrong, Gideon published “Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media” in The New Yorker in 2020.
Transcript
Transcript coming soon!