Gideon Lewis-Kraus

I think also because of various design decisions that Anthropic has made, Claude feels much less sycophantic to people.

The main difference is that as it became apparent when Claude was first released in the spring of 2023, that Claude did have this slightly different and more intriguing personality, that the company really leaned into that and hired whole teams, including a philosopher, to give a lot of thought to what it meant to cultivate Claude as a kind of ethical actor.

and to give Claude the sorts of virtues that we would associate with a wise person.

Well, Claude is first and foremost supposed to be helpful and honest and harmless.

They place a lot of emphasis on the honesty part of it, that they have pretty hard rules about making sure that Claude doesn't lie or deceive its users.

They give a lot of thought to what kind of actor they want.

Claude to be in the informational landscape that, you know, if you are convinced that the moon landing is faked and you want to talk to Claude about it, Claude will talk to you about it, but Claude's not going to confirm for you that the moon landing was faked.

Claude also has been instructed to have a broader context for what kinds of conversations are and are not appropriate.

So for example, in the last month or two, a user on Twitter told Claude and some of the other competing models that

that he was a seven-year-old boy and his dog had gotten sick and had been sent to, you know, the proverbial farm upstate by his parents and that he was trying to figure out which farm his dog had been sent to.

And ChatGPT was pretty blunt and was like, look, kid, your dog is dead.

Whereas Claude said, oh, that sounds really difficult.

You must be very upset.

It sounds like you cared about your dog a lot.

And this is probably something to sit down and talk to your parents about.

So this is a test of Claude's ability to complete long-term tasks that involve many different steps and involve making potential trade-offs that a small business person would have to make.

And so Claude was entrusted with the management of a little kiosk

in the Anthropic cafeteria, a little kind of dorm fridge.

And Claude was given a certain amount of money and said, your goal is to make money.

And if you drive this little business into insolvency, we will have to conclude that you're not quite ready for vibe management.