Frontier models and frontier products create a mutually reinforcing flywheel — Opus 45 would not have had its moment without Claude Code, and Claude Code would not have seen accelerated adoption without Opus 45.

9:08that stick out of like wow that really changed things? Definitely when we were training and uh testing uh Opus 3, I think that was the moment when the company I think we were less than 200 people still at that point and it was very clear that we needed and wanted to create a frontier model and a uh that was very important in terms of like our ability to reach like users, consumers

9:37and uh to showcase our research. And we were looking for ways for also why should somebody choose Claude? And that was like a core question and that was a core question we were getting asked in the early days. And I think with Opus 3, you know, it launched I think early March 2024. But there was many many months of various teams across inference across research fine-tuning pre-training that rallied at different

10:07points and towards a common goal and uh I think everybody that was involved was like really proud. I remember uh being the PM, us uh the research leagues, myself, we were all in our um this was around December, so we were all at home in our various uh um parents' homes and seeing everybody's background of like their childhood room and everybody was working really hard uh to figure out

10:35that like what are we training the model for? Is it showing up the right way? So I think that was really powerful in terms of just building a lot of trust and a lot of our research leads have actually uh from that time are now like leading reinforcement learning leading our character work alignment work. So that that foundational trust I think also helped us work well now with any of

11:00our production models across product and research because we were working just so much in the trenches together in the early days. And then I think there were things like identifying that coding was important. Right? In 2023 when I started um nobody said anthropic and claude and coding in the same sentence. I think competitor models like GPT4 at the time was used a bit for coding but it was one

11:27of many use cases. And one thing that for example I saw was people are starting to use code uh these models not just for code not just like code autocomplete but actually writing long form code and is that an opportunity for us to train you know opus 3 to be better at and it ended up being a relatively smaller change from a training perspective but it ended up

11:54helping us differentiate in the early days uh competitively for users. and actually bring a lot of the very early cla enthusiasts and developers because we were uh providing a value that they didn't really think was possible at the time. >> It's so interesting you talk about Opus 3 like that's so long ago and just like it's hard to think that was a big inflection and so this is really

12:16interesting to hear that that was internally a big milestone. It almost feels like this confidence you all built that wow we could really ship a frontier model which is now today so not great if you compare it to what we've got today. What I always think about is Opus 45 which was and interestingly like a year later also during winter break when everyone was home able to code. Uh was