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

Episode notes

Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude - from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.

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