Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI

This interview features a conversation with Nick Joseph, the head of pre-training at Anthropic, who discusses his background, including his time at Vicarious and OpenAI, and how he became involved in AI safety. The discussion covers the basics of pre-training, its role in AI model development, and Anthropic's approach to strategy, data, alignment, and infrastructure. Nick explains the evolution of pre-training objectives, the importance of compute, and the challenges of scaling AI models, including hardware limitations and the need for efficient distributed frameworks. He also touches on the balance between pre-training and post-training, the availability of high-quality data, and the importance of alignment in AI development, as well as future directions and challenges in the field, such as paradigm shifts and the need for robust engineering skills.