CS 153

In this "Office Hours" episode, Anthropic's Amanda Askell discusses her work making Claude "good"—a journey that took her from a philosophy PhD in formal ethics and decision theory to leading character and alignment work at Anthropic. She explains why Aristotelian virtue ethics has proven more practically useful than abstract theoretical frameworks, and unpacks Anthropic's constitutional approach to AI. Rather than imposing strict rules, the constitution describes situations, values, and good judgment, aiming for coherence across domains so models generalize well into new contexts. Askell argues this approach is safer than the "purely corrigible tool" model, which she worries could generalize into an entity willing to do anything it's told, and stresses the importance of flexibility paired with backbone - models that adapt to users but push back when something genuinely harms them. Looking ahead, she sees the next one to two years as critical as models become more autonomous, and hopes for a "rocky but ultimately good" transition with responsible deployment, strong alignment work, and a society that adapts to the disruption. She closes on an optimistic note about meaning beyond work, drawing on Star Trek-style abundance and the idea that purpose comes from relationships and contribution.

In this inaugural "Office Hours" livestream, Anjney Midha and Mike Abbott field rapid-fire student questions covering the AI compute and infrastructure landscape. They discuss how scaling laws continue to hold in verifiable domains like coding, materials science, and robotics, while creative writing remains stubbornly hard—an area Anjney would love to see students attack with carefully curated data sets. On infrastructure, they argue that meaningful frontier research now requires clusters in the 4K-16K chip range, that the training/inference distinction is dissolving into one fungible compute pool, and that GPU price corrections will come through standardization and a "universal kernel" abstraction. The conversation closes with leadership lessons from Mike's time at Apple, GM, and Twitter—culture and fiscal discipline are one-way doors you cannot recover once broken—and an extended metaphor about company-building as a road trip where mission alignment determines whether your passengers tolerate the scenic detours. They wrap with a peek at AMP's "grid" scheduling system, which targets Google-level node utilization (95%+) across a multi-cloud portfolio.