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Anthropic's Labs Lead On Fable's Capabilities + Building AI-Native Products — With Mike Krieger

Big Technology Podcast
In this episode of the Big Technology Podcast, recorded live at the Big Technology AI Summit, Mike Krieger, head of Anthropic Labs and Instagram co-founder, offers a rare inside look at Anthropic during a turbulent week. He discusses the government-mandated removal of the company's frontier models, Fable and Mythos, and shares how working with these advanced AIs is fundamentally changing his approach to building products.
Krieger compares the user backlash over the removal of the Fable model to the outcry when Instagram removed the Gotham filter, advising listeners to ignore initial reactions to new AI models. He insists that Anthropic's safety warnings are substantive, citing the proactive scanning that led to the Mythos case. Despite the ban, work continues with less capable models, though Fable and Mythos enable far greater delegation. Krieger explains how AI is shifting from specific tasks to broader goals, with Fable converting a Python project to TypeScript overnight. He details Anthropic Labs' role in bridging model capabilities and product development, aiming to create AI-native products like Claude Code rather than replicating existing ones. Key areas of exploration include giving Claude more agency and self-knowledge for better interoperability. Finally, the discussion covers measuring AI productivity, suggesting outcome-based pricing over token usage, and Anthropic's focus on societal impact.
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Ignore early model release noise.
10:30
10:30
AI can now handle complex, multi-step work
29:43
29:43
Closing the gap between AI capabilities and real-world work
32:25
32:25
Token usage doesn't always correlate with high output.