Why Claude Feels Different (And What That Means for AI) | The a16z Show

It's funny how the internet is now: everybody can comment on everything. Every technology cycle, to me, is increasingly harder because you're probably going into a different part of how the human mind operates. Right now, we're developing personality. That's insane.

There's technology, there's culture, which is collective, and then there's our individual progress as a human species. Culture's changing, technology's improving. Where are we as people? I can't believe the scale at which we're at now. It's absolutely unbelievable.

I was at OpenAI, and we were discussing how to think about personality development in models, and these are really technically hard problems. I think the number one challenge, as even OpenAI mentioned, is how we make the power of the models more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do. I think this is happening with agents, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals. I think the number one way you change the NPS of AI is you make important things cheap, quickly.

You're live with signüll, the great culture commentator of our time. You have opinions on everything from what's happening in AI, both as a consumer and in the industry, to what's happening at all the big tech companies, to what's happened in dating markets more broadly, to how the product should be developed. There's no commentator like you. How do you make sense of yourself on the internet in terms of how you thread these topics together? What sort of thread ties it all together?

I could have an opinion on Iran and dating at the same time.

Maybe even Iranian dating. You're like, by the way, how does it work there? Are they using Tinder? I don't know. There's probably several jokes there about love bombing and stuff.

All right, I apologize.

Yeah, don't apologize. I have this weird tendency to add humor to things that are maybe not appropriate.

Anyway, I think, look, it's funny how the internet is now—everybody can comment on everything. There are a lot of people who have a great perspective in a singular dimension. You've got Ben Thompson writing about technology and markets. If you want an analysis of an earnings report from Microsoft, who better in the world than Ben Thompson? You can have Packy writing about deep tech and crazy, I think, 40-page papers about industries and things. They're really fun to read, really great things.

What I notice is that I've been in technology for such a long time, since I was a kid. I'm particularly fascinated with culture in general as well, and I think that intersection of tech and culture is so fascinating to me. I like to relate everything back to computer science and how I've learned about the world through computer science and computers in general.

I think all my tweets and things are, in essence, relating the idea of life to technology and culture to technology. Maybe it's interesting, or maybe this is just how my mind works. I think my writing is all a reflection of the prompts that happen in my brain, which get translated somehow into words that are in the right order, that other people can interpret and therefore have a reaction to—and maybe generate a little bit of hate online or a little bit of love. I think that's actually quite beautiful, that we're all—

That's the most poetic thing I've ever heard. I do have a Shakespeare profile.

Exactly. And I think that's been great. I grew up playing a game called SimCity. In SimCity, you can increase the simulation speed. There's a button that allows you to increase the speed of the city. The cars move faster, the people move faster, the disasters happen faster—everything is just increased.

I feel like, in the recent—obviously, in the last 20 years with respect to the iPhone and whatnot—but in the last 2, 3, 4 years, holy shit, who the hell hit the 100x speed? It feels ridiculous. If I talked to somebody about something that happened last month, it feels like it happened 10 years ago. Nicolás Maduro got pulled from Venezuela and brought to America in the most amazing outfit, and people forgot about this.

It's just incredibly fascinating, the way the world is moving so fast and technology is accelerating that. If technology is the fuel that's empowering that engine, I don't know what we did, but it's moving really, really fast.

And then, if I were to almost separate the 3 ideas, there's technology, there's culture, which is collective, and then there's however you measure our individual progress as a human species. Culture's changing, technology's improving—where are we as people? Are we more spiritually mature or less spiritually mature than we were 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? Are we just basically Neanderthals with iPhones?

I think generally technology should help us understand ourselves better, such that we are able to have intellectual and spiritual potential growth as a species, as a collective, and as individuals, I suspect. I firmly believe that. I'm pro-technology helping us achieve that.

I love using AI to be able to understand myself. If I say something, it's like, "Wait, does this make sense? Is this more interesting? How do I personally think about it? What am I missing?" Those are really things that help me grow intellectually, spiritually, personally, in relationships—all of those things.

So, inherently, if I understand your question correctly, it's more like these things are really helping us experience ourselves much better. I think that probably is the greatest achievement you can possibly have. I mean, we're tool builders.

Every tool that we've ever built has helped us progress as a human species, or individually, whether it's art, the wheel, or whatever. I can't believe the scale at which we're at now. It's absolutely unbelievable. What's shocking to me is that the collective has not caught on yet.

Do you think the norms around AI relationships with boyfriends, girlfriends, or just best friendships are going to be something in the next 5 to 10 years, to a degree that seems unimaginable right now for the average person? Or what do you think?

When you have ease of access and reward structures around it, and a deep human desire paired with it, I think you get some interesting outcomes. The desire and the pursuit of connection is an incredible and important element of any human's existence. The idea that AI can help you facilitate that with depth and scale—and AI doesn't get tired—is powerful.

What else is surprising you most about how people are interacting with AI, particularly the different models? What are you observing as you're looking at the landscape and trying to make sense of where things are going?

First of all, I don't think most people are utilizing them for anything beyond the basics. It's fascinating to me that every single time we're focused on really advanced capability demonstrations: "Holy crap, this is a PhD researcher," or whatever.

I don't think most people are utilizing them in such a fashion, obviously. I think most people are utilizing them for very, very basic tasks. So I think we're in the Stone Age of how people view, perceive, and use these things, even though there are 1 billion people utilizing them. They're not utilizing them to the full extent of their capabilities.

I think the number one challenge—even OpenAI mentioned this—is how we make the power of the models more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do. I think this is happening with agents. It's happening today, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals.

I personally like to think about this because of the way I like to think about the world. One of my favorite Shakespeare quotes—and this is why the Shakespeare picture exists—is, "Brevity is the soul of wit." Shakespeare was able to capture an essence of the world in very simple—not simple terminology; maybe back then it was simple—but in a few words or a few sentences.

I think we need to make this stuff much more easily accessible and useful for individuals. I don't know how that will be or what that will look like, but it's certainly something that I love to think about personally. I don't know where we'll end up, but I view it more as an art than a science at the moment.

It's cool. It's a fun time to exist as a technologist.

A lot of people are wondering what to even work on in the age of the big labs—what to start, how to think about what could be a real company versus something that they'll end up doing, or what's just worth doing. How have you thought about it, or how do you advise people to think about that?

A lot of AI today is very much about the big labs kind of dominating consumer territory—OpenAI and Anthropic—and then tons and tons of people trying to find a business use case for it in various verticals. It's interesting. I personally focus on what I'm passionate about.

I was at a demo day or whatever. There were a lot of individuals who I thought had clearly found the idea through AI to work out what to work on. It was fascinating. I was like, “Are you really interested in real estate? I don’t know. Do you want to spend your time working on this? Is this an interesting problem?” I don’t think about it from a technology perspective. Screw AI. I don’t care about it. What area are you interested in? What thing drives you?

If I were an investor, I think that’s probably the only thing that matters: Are you going to keep going into this problem space? If you’re not that interested in it—look, we’re having a lot of fun doing this. And I think if you’re not having a lot of fun doing stuff, you probably shouldn’t work on it. It’s a privileged thing, obviously, and often a lot of people don’t find work fun. They have to do it because it’s economically necessary. But if you’re going to build a company, try to have fun with it.

There’s a great quote in the Bhagavad Gita, which I read recently again, and I was like, “You’re not entitled to the fruits of your labor.” I never think about the outcomes. I just try to figure out what I enjoy, how much fun I like to have, and the problems that I like thinking about. This account that I have is just pure fun. I really enjoy talking and thinking about this, and my brain prompts me to think about it.

We were talking about this: the real prompt is in your brain. [Laughter.] That is where it originates. Then you’re translating that into some text that you’re sending into AI, where we call that a prompt.

Sure, yeah, but without the spark in your existence, in your inner self, nothing would happen.

This is some Rick Rubin shit, man.

It’s true. It’s so fucking true.

We should get you together with Rick. This is why I think Rick Rubin—people made fun of him. No, he’s amazing. He’s incredible because he was ahead of the curve.

Oh, totally. And I know, Anish, you’re a giant in DJing and music, but it’s something you have to feel.

Yeah. You have to feel it.

You have to feel it. And there’s such an important element to it. I think when you’re doing anything new—building a company—you have to feel it. So, okay, I have a question for you. There are 2 different archetypes of great consumer founders. I’d say the modern archetype is somebody like Boris, who’s working on Claude Code, or, of course, Dario, or Sam and some of his co-founders, who are so extraordinarily technical. They’re willing these things into existence that were unimaginable 5 years ago. That’s great, and ChatGPT is the fastest product to what I think is a billion users, et cetera, et cetera.

There’s another archetype from the Web 2.0 days. These are the gentle, sort of consumer philosophers whose canvas was technology. Think Ev. Think Kevin Rose. All these people were just cut from a different cloth, and they were perhaps more students of culture than technology. And you’ve got 2 very different types of companies. I don’t quite know where I’d put Zuck, but let’s set him aside for a moment.

Do you think there’s a preferred model? Is the gentle builder more of a New York-informed model, and the technical builder more of an SF-informed model? Is it just something that matches with the product cycle? And then maybe talk a bit about what you think your strengths are and how it meets the moment.

I think of most people as one type of artist or another. And they have brushstrokes that they use. I was like Monet, and what I love is going in and looking at the actual brushstrokes of the painting. Then you get this pixel-level understanding of, like, “Wow, he used this color for this brushstroke,” whatever. Then you zoom out and you’re like, “Oh my God, I see this wonderful little painting.” And I’m deeply inspired by it.

People are utilizing different styles and different forms. But in the end, when you’re doing anything new, it is just a sort of canvas, like the painting. Some people like hard-edge paintings and this Renaissance style, and some people like modern art, and some people like water lilies. I think it’s just a different form.

At least all the initial versions of it, going back to Web 2.0 with Kevin Rose, were from a very different time, because building network products like that, whether it’s Digg or Twitter—

Right.

Those were fundamentally different from developing personalities of a model. Holy crap, I was at OpenAI, and we were discussing a bunch of things around how you think about personality development in models, the fact that you can’t really easily change them, and how you reduce the sycophancy of the models. These are really technically hard problems.

I think every technology cycle, to me, is increasingly harder because you’re probably going into a different part of how the human mind, or how the human, operates. Right now, we’re developing personality. That’s insane. If you’d asked 10 years ago if we were going to build personalities for computers, you would have been like, “Wait, what? What does that really mean?”

Yeah.

These guys—with Kevin and Jack and whatnot—they were architecting delivery vehicles, in some sense. They were developing architecture for humans to add payload and then send it to another human, whether it’s broadcast or one-to-one. With Digg, it was the news, and people posted in the comments. Twitter was another version of that.

Now I think we’re designing this upper echelon of how a human personality works and how intelligence works. That’s a grand— it’s such a— It no longer feels like a delivery vehicle. It feels like the actual thing in the payload and the underlying— I don’t know if that makes sense. This is how my mind works. I don’t know if you guys think about it that way, but in some sense, we’ve leveled up a lot, and the complexity has increased drastically.

Training a model and then reinforcement learning from human feedback—what’s interesting is that there are multiple different types of ways that things engage.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you’ve observed in terms of the personality differences between models, or what you think particularly makes Claude so interesting?

I think one of the things that they focused on, going back to our Rick Rubin point, is that it feels artisan. It feels like it’s got a soul. Whereas, in some sense, the other models feel a little bit more robotic, a little bit more utilitarian, if you will.

If you think about what AGI is—and I think there’s a great Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul for $5 to Milhouse. It was one of the most profound, interesting episodes of The Simpsons. He wrote “Bart’s soul” on a piece of paper and then handed it to him. Then he felt it. He felt like he didn’t have a soul. [Snorts.]

I found that really interesting because it sort of explores the idea of, going back to our initial point, what is a human, and what are we? What are we doing here? How does technology help us understand ourselves and the way that we exist?

I felt like there was less sycophancy. There was this pushback. It was like talking to a real human being. It’s personified. It’s called Claude. Claude is known as a person, so it feels very crafted—artisan, dare I say, premium to a certain extent.

It’s been really fun. My sister is a doctor, and she randomly just said—she was using ChatGPT for a few years, and she canceled it. She was like, “I’m using Claude now.” I got a weird—I was like, “What? How did you find out about this? What?”

It’s nuts. And I think it just goes to show you that the proliferation, marketing, and storytelling of Claude have been aesthetically really next-level. It’s been really, really fun to watch. I like good products. I like talking about good products, and I like praising the people who make good products. That’s what we’re about here, right? Give credit where credit is due. They’ve made a beautiful little tool.

When paired with a thing in your pocket that is also crafted and artisan—Apple and the iPhone—you get this really magical, intelligent experience on your device wherever you are.

How do you think about what these product experiences might look like in a couple of years? How do you see the interface evolving, or what are you predicting is on the horizon?

I think the most interesting thing to me is that they seem to be in a very infant state, in some sense. They’re really powerful in one end of the dimension, but they’re also— It’s unclear to me whether experiencing intelligence through just conversation back and forth is one way. The ambient layers are really fun and interesting to think about. We’re building a fun little product that woke you up with AI, and it’s a very primitive thing.

Everybody wakes up in the morning. God forbid otherwise. How is it going to weave into your daily existence—not as a chatbot, but more as a sort of ethereal entity that exists? Movies have obviously personified this, and there’s been Her and whatnot, but it’s going to be fascinating to see how it weaves into your daily life, whether it’s at home or work, in a very ambient state.

I know it’s potentially not about listening to you all the time, but I think there are a lot of these explorations that have yet to be done at the interface layer. How does AI talk to you first? Today, that’s roughly a push notification. Is that it? I don’t know.

How does Apple integrate AI into iOS and weave it into the operating system? How do we use applications or specific types of things? Are they even necessary anymore? Do we even need an interface if we’re just talking to it? I don’t know. I think those are really interesting questions.

I personally like the ambient AI layer. I think that’s what you’re seeing a little bit of with OpenClaw and whatnot—working agents working in the background and surfacing the right things at the right time. There was a great product a while ago that didn’t work called Google Now. The whole purpose of Google Now was to predict search, right? It was like, “What are you going to search for next, Erik?”—prediction, in some sense.

It was ahead of its time in some sense, but when you marry it with context and intelligence, I think that’s actually a huge vector for how to think about the future of AI and how this stuff will weave into our lives. I don’t think there’s going to be a single person who doesn’t use this stuff. It’s just a matter of when.

Yeah. Right. That’s going to be interesting. I don’t know. On that note, just a quick story: I remember asking Balaji, “How do you know so much about crypto and economics and biotech and math and science and all these things? Give me all the books you read.”

He said, “Books? I don’t read books. I just get in fights with people on the internet.” That’s how he internalizes all the information. It’s real time. I need to know I learn what I need to know to win the argument. Then he really remembers it.

Conceptually, those are really fun ways to have these discussions. Obviously, some of it may not be kosher to say or do out loud, but I think that’s actually really cool.

Learning from other people is what we do best. Monkeys—apes—watch other people. They use tools because they learn how to use them. Imagine if I’m using a tool wrong, like a hammer backwards or whatever, and somebody says, “No, you’re an idiot. This is how you use it.” Wonderful. Now I’ve benefited.

Maybe that other person got a dopamine hit because they proved me wrong, and I think in the end we all win. It’s great. I think that’s how I treat my account in some ways. It’s almost as if I’m not really trying to gain anything; I just don’t have anything to lose. What do I lose by being wrong?

I have a question for you. There’s a study that came out a few weeks ago that generated a bunch of conversation: in China, AI is highly popular; in the U.S., AI is very unpopular. In fact, it’s even less popular than ICE right now. The NPS of AI is not great in this country. How would you fix that?

I always think about movements, right? When people create movements, they’re rooted in simple storytelling. In some ways, we’re in fear-driven development. There’s a lot of fear being generated as a result of this, and I think there’s a positive framing to all of it.

Look, I think we’re moving toward a world where, hopefully, there are highly abundant elements of everything. Right now, we all feel like we’re fighting for resources—capital, labor, whatever. People think of the world as a finite amount of things.

In Silicon Valley, we have this classic thing where it’s like, “Everything is grow the pie.” Everything is positive-sum. Not all people really think about that. They don’t really think about growing the pie. At least, I don’t know. I’d love to get your perspective on this.

Unfortunately, we are, in some sense, primitive in that we’re competing for resources, competing for finite things, and whatnot. But I think the framing has to be around the idea that, hopefully, if we do our jobs well, we’re moving toward a world that’s highly abundant in everything that humans might actually want.

The promise of AI is that you make important things cheap quickly.

Mhm.

Soon, okay? We’ve all seen the famous chart that Marc Andreessen has tweeted a thousand times, which is the diffusion of product prices on a per-product-category basis. This is the famous one where everything is essentially referenced to 1970, and then certain things get more expensive and certain things get cheaper. The number-one thing that gets cheaper is flat-screen TVs. Flat-screen TVs are asymptoting to essentially $0.

Yep.

The things that are getting expensive are healthcare, education, and housing. There’s actually a little bit of math—and I did this math a few months ago—that you can do to show how you can make education and healthcare cheaper with AI very, very quickly. By cheaper, I don’t mean disinflation, which is a reduced rate of inflation. I mean actual deflation—cheaper than it was last year.

So, here’s the math. Just consider it for a moment. Education is actually the easiest one. If you restore student-to-administrator ratios to what they were 10 years ago and make professors modestly more productive—modestly—then you can actually have education in schools getting cheaper every year.

The explosion of administrators—not professors, not teachers, but administrators—is totally underdiscussed, and it’s insane. You can make education cheaper. We could do it right away. We already have all the technology; we just have to make a different set of choices.

For healthcare, 45% of healthcare costs are administration. It’s all this overhead. If you’ve done the healthcare thing, we’ve all done it, right? Revenue cycle management, all the back-office stuff, all the nurses phoning you to tell you what drugs to take the night before you get a procedure—all of that is overhead, and it all adds to the cost.

If you can take a bunch of the cost out of that with models—and, by the way, these are the numbers by category—the number-one consumers of OpenAI models, for example, are healthcare companies and healthcare startups. You can make healthcare cheaper year over year.

I think our moonshot as an industry should be to make these 2 things way cheaper in the next 5 years. That’s how we’re going to win the hearts and minds.

Would you subsidize it?

What do you mean?

Effectively, should the model companies give it away for free to these industries?

Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

I don’t know how you subsidize it in the world.

Maybe at cost.

Or whatever, or something like that. But it’s very interesting because Chris Dixon said this a while ago, which really got me thinking. He said, “How many of our problems in society are actually intelligence-bound versus being collective-action problems?”

That’s why the third category I mentioned—healthcare, education, and housing—matters. Housing has nothing to do with intelligence or technology. It’s entirely a collective-action problem. We could just build skyscrapers in Marin tomorrow, and it would be abundant, cheap housing for everybody, but we have to decide to do that together.

I wonder if giving things away or making them free—I wonder if people will realize it.

I think generally the world has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. You can go to Walmart and buy a hair dryer for $5. That’s ridiculous.

I remember—I’m not trying to do this again—but I tweeted about this.

Of course I remember you. I’m an encyclopedia of signal, bro.

I remember. No, it’s like, billionaires drink the same Coke as you do. They’re using the same goddamn iPhone. They’re using Claude and ChatGPT just like you are. The underlying access is incredibly similar.

But they don’t have the same healthcare you have, and we should fix that.

That’s true. If you get sick as a billionaire versus a normal person, what’s the delta?

Dude, you’d be surprised. Look at New York State right now, right? Your beloved New York City—

Assuming you have insurance, right? That’s probably the—

In New York State, they’re about to make it illegal at the state level to give or receive health advice or financial advice via model. Oh my God. How fucked up is that?

People who have lawyers and doctors already are going to be unaffected, and people who use the models for lawyers and doctors are once again set back enormously. How can we be okay with that? A lot of these are own goals. It’s crazy.

If you look at it, the state of Massachusetts made it illegal to buy Apple stock because it was too speculative when Apple was going public. It was the early ’80s—the home of Elizabeth Warren.

It's like we must protect consumers from these abnormal financial gains. The number of ridiculous things that are done in the name of protection is staggering, and I think that is a fundamental underestimation of the average consumer. Yeah, right? I think people are pretty smart, pretty savvy. They talk, they'll figure things out, and if you don't prevent them from accessing the tools, they'll use those tools to make their lives better.

I have a weird idea.

Tell me.

The fact that we don't allow normal people to have equity, shares, or stakes in OpenAI and Claude is insane. Imagine if normal people were like, “I own a piece of these things.” Maybe that would feel much better, and they would have this ownership mentality. Right now, all this concentration is happening in Silicon Valley and with a few people. Give people access to create and a sense of ownership. Imagine if 1 billion people had stock in OpenAI in some way, shape, or form. That's a dumb idea, but would they be more bought in on AI? Would they have a positive view of AI?

What if their kids did? What if you rolled it into the Trump accounts? It's like, “Look, I have my job, and I think I'll be okay, and now I know that my kids will be okay, too.”

Yeah, they have a stake in the future.

That's right. Quite literally. No, you can market it that way.

That, to me, has been a very weird development, where I do think people perceive tech individuals as hoarding or concentrating resources and wealth. For example, we're all privileged in technology, and it's wonderful. A lot of us are exposed to this, whether it's via equity or whatnot, or even just usage. But I think there's potentially a perception, with all the power-law outcomes that happen, that there is a concentration or a hoarding, if you want to use negative terminology like that. And that creates a weird dynamic.

Right. Like, I'm going to get left behind.

Yep, while the guys in San Francisco are going to be enormously wealthy. I've heard people feeling this way, and especially, you know, there's potentially negative sentiment in technology. The NPS score probably reflects that, right?

Yeah. And that is not—I think that's something to be fixed, and ownership might fix that. But I mean, I love—I think the power-law dynamic that Peter introduced is really fascinating to me, because it was about business outcomes. The internet drives power-law outcomes in a variety of different scenarios as well, not just business, and I think people are starting to catch up. People are seeing the wealth discrepancy that exists, and technology is a crazy accelerator. We talked about this right at the beginning of it. This technology is accelerating returns. I think that's maybe something to look at. I don't know if that's the right answer or whatever, but I did see that tweet about the concentration of inaccessible private companies, and how companies are staying private longer.

Yeah. What does that really mean? That's crazy. Right. Maybe we should have a law that says you have to go public at some point before XYZ.

Do you have thoughts on the way our system is structured and things like that? Anything you want to tease, or how do you want to—

Oh, that's a great question. We're building a fun little consumer product, and I'm excited to storytell on this. We're 3 people having fun building a fun little consumer AI interface and what we think might be really interesting for average, normal people to experience and use. It works out of the box, so I'm very excited for that. That's been really fun. It's what we've been up to. One of the fundamental things is that I just don't want to talk the talk. I want to walk the walk.

Cool.

I'm excited to be able to share what we're up to. It's small, it's fun, it's interesting, and we're going to see how well it lands.