Tanya Mosley

We'll be right back.

This is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air.

Today I'm talking with journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus about his New Yorker feature, What is Claude?

Anthropic doesn't know either.

These systems are now able to write their own code.

You write about an anthropic engineer who told you that in six months, the proportion of code he wrote himself dropped from 100% to zero.

And then there was another programmer who told you he was trying to think about how to use his time now that Claude is working better.

So these are people in the building who are working on this thing, and they're watching themselves become obsolete in real time.

And to a certain extent, this is what happens with advancements, but is this progression different?

I'm wondering now that you have spent time inside of Anthropic, you've been covering this beat for a long time.

I mean, you had this cover story in 2016 for the New York Times Magazine, The Great AI Awakening.

And so you've been spending a lot of time thinking about these breakthroughs.

What this technology has changed in you as a reporter covering this?

Gideon Lewis Krauss is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

His latest article is titled, What is Claude?

Anthropic doesn't know either.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, author Michael Pollan.

His book on psychedelics helped change how we think about the mind and what it's capable of under the right conditions.

His new book goes further, asking, what is consciousness?