The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month. I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…

Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech . . . Surprise 2: that person is me Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post …and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline ------- Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere. The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases. Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat. In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally. Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants). In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model. From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team. Why join Anthropic? Three reasons. (1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work. (2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter. (3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing. Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit. Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest). Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI. Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have. It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way. But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember... Gotta Cure 'Em All

Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of drug development. In this blog post, we share some early results from these efforts, and describe how this work fits in with our wider ambitions in the life sciences. anthropic.com/research/early…

Genie 4 runs DOOM: "Walking through a typical office but every computer is running DOOM and all of the walls are also running DOOM and also everything is DOOM" "My coworker who is a demon appears" "He has a chaingun" "He gives me a bonus"

Rumors that chili maker Lao Gan Ma laid off 500+ workers due to AI have gone viral in China. Beneath Beijing’s positive messaging, many ordinary Chinese people are worried about AI and jobs. Lao Gan Ma recently touted a new AI-powered chili inspection system that uses high-speed industrial cameras that significantly outperform manual inspection. A stat about the company using this AI system to reduce human inspectors from 600 to 48 went viral on Chinese social media. The iconic, family-run company pushed back. But if you look at the data, the company has reduced headcount from 2,912 to 740 in the past few years while earning record revenues. Original story: m.jiemian.com/article/152425…

Excited to share Genie 4 today our most realistic and interactive world model: - steer dynamic environments in real time, shaping events, camera angles, and actions - generate native audio matched to the world, from realistic background sounds to characters who can converse in real time! - simulate photorealistic scenes and real-world physics - create more coherent multi-step events through reasoning from Gemini We've started to roll out as a research preview to trusted testers. Coming soon to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie and early access partners via the Gemini API and AI Studio.

Many of you don't understand how serious this is, so let me break it down. In computer science there is a famous kind of puzzle called 3-SAT. You are given a long list of yes-or-no switches and a set of rules about how they must be arranged, and you have to find a combination that satisfies every rule. The obvious way to solve it is to try every combination, but each new switch doubles the number of possibilities, so a puzzle with a few hundred switches would take longer than the age of the universe to brute force. For decades, the smartest people in the field found clever tricks that made this a little faster, but every trick still hit the same wall: the time required kept exploding as the puzzle grew. About 25 years ago, two computer scientists, Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, working with Francis Zane, turned that wall into a formal idea. They proposed the Exponential Time Hypothesis, which says this explosion is not a failure of human cleverness but a law of nature. No algorithm, however brilliant, will ever solve 3-SAT without the time blowing up exponentially. Nobody could prove it, but almost everyone believed it, and it became one of the foundations of modern computer science. Researchers used it as a measuring stick. If you could show that solving some other problem quickly would also crack 3-SAT quickly, you had shown that problem was hopelessly hard too. Hundreds of papers, across scheduling, graphs, logic and much more, rest on this one assumption. Now an internal AI model at OpenAI claims to have broken it. It says it found an algorithm that solves these puzzles meaningfully faster than the hypothesis allows, and it has checked the proof in a computer verification system called Lean. And here is the remarkable part: the very people who proposed the hypothesis, Impagliazzo and Paturi, along with MIT's Ryan Williams, are now leading the public review of whether a machine has disproved their own idea. So what happens next? If the disproof holds, a large part of theoretical computer science has to be revisited. Every result that said "this problem cannot be solved faster, assuming ETH" loses its foundation, and researchers will have to work out which of those walls were real and which were simply where we stopped looking. It does not mean everything becomes easy. The new algorithm is still slow in absolute terms and this is not the famous P versus NP problem being solved. But it means our map of what is possible was wrong in a place we were very confident about, and it was an AI that redrew it. If the disproof fails, the hypothesis survives and the field breathes out, but we will still have watched an AI produce serious, checkable work on one of the deepest questions in the discipline, closely enough that the founders of the idea had to take it seriously. Either way, something has shifted.

“The core algorithm was found on October 16 by an internal Claude research model with 14M output tokens and no human input. Anthropic researchers worked with Claude to improve the presentation, resulting in this paper.” github.com/anthropics/formal…

SITUATION UPDATE: Following GMO Internet's refusal to pay a $50M ransom, the hackers behind the breach have promised to trigger ransomware covertly planted on customers' PCs via the cloud. GMO is urging users to unplug network cables, and power off their PCs before noon today.

Today Physical Superintelligence PBC is announcing solutions to five long-standing problems in quantum information theory. psi.inc/research/oqp-batch-2… Thread 👇

p still probably doesn't equal np

Anthropic files for IPO. But who is poised to get the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 Investors will be sharing nearly $1 TRILLION of proceeds on ~$142b invested. A ~6.5x blended multiple on a huge amount of capital, in just 5 years. 🤯 Note: all those numbers assume a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation. So let’s dive in 🔎 1) The craziest fact: no VC in the Series A or Series B 🤯 The $124m Series A in May-21 was led by Jaan Tallinn (Skype’s co-founder), with Dustin Moskovitz and Eric Schmidt. It is likely to return ~345x the original capital, or ~$43b to those early angels. Mind-boggling. The $982m Series B in 2022 was led by... SBF and FTX: it will return ~79x the capital invested. FTX’s $500m would be worth ~$39b today. Plot twist: the estate sold it for ~$1.3b in 2024, in one of the worst trades ever. 2) The first VCs in: Spark and Menlo are killing it 🏆 Spark will make over $10b from its Anthropic investments. They first came into the 2023 Series C and are making ~79x their investment in that round. They followed in every single round since, investing $777m in total, now worth ~$11b. Menlo led the Jan-24 Series D and will make ~30x its money on that round. And finally, Lightspeed’s Series E lead will make ~16x in 18 months. 3) The real winners in $ terms: the strategics 💰 Amazon put a grand total of ~$18b in, mostly via convertible notes converting at ~$2 a share, against $58.90 for the Series H investors. That gives Amazon ~21% of the company, worth ~$310b. That’s ~17x its investment. 💵 Google is not that far behind: its notes and the $10b it put in this April alone will be worth ~$83b. And that’s before the compute: Anthropic has committed $110b+ to AWS and $111b to Google Cloud. They are both investors and suppliers, so they win twice. 4) Founders and team: incredible outcome, and giving most of it away 🙏 The seven co-founders hold ~240m shares each. That’s ~$21b per person, or ~$150b combined. 👏 And each of them has pledged 80% of it to philanthropy. So ~$120b will be going to good causes. On top of that, Anthropic put 5% of the company (~$75b) into its own Public Benefit Fund. And the IPO will mint a huge number of UHNW in the team: they will share ~$355b worth of shares, options and RSUs. Perhaps the biggest and fastest employee wealth creation event in history. Congrats to Dario, Daniela and everyone involved. Legendary. 👏

We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory. openai.com/index/building-sc…

Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 employees. This latest exit offer is available to far more employees than the previous retirement one, and comes just months after Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees. Full details here 👇theverge.com/tech/1018666/mi…