Ep 66: Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic Sholto Douglas on Claude 4, Next Phase for AI Coding, and the Path to AI Coworkers | Unsupervised Learning | Podwise
In this interview, Jacob Effron speaks with Sholto Douglas from Anthropic about the newly released Claude 4 models. Sholto highlights the advancements in software engineering capabilities, particularly the model's ability to handle ill-specified tasks in large codebases autonomously. They discuss how developers can leverage these models, focusing on coding agents and managing multiple models for parallel tasks. Sholto shares insights on memory, instruction following, and tool use, emphasizing the importance of reliability in agents. The conversation touches on the potential impact of AI on GDP, the automation of white-collar jobs, and the need for advancements in robotics and biology. Sholto also discusses alignment research, the plausibility of AI 2027 scenarios, and the role of governments in AI policy. He concludes by highlighting the underhyped potential of world models and the importance of basic science in understanding language models.
