“One of the early projects I did at Anthropic is I learned SQL, a programming language, and it took me years to master. And then as a little side project, I got Claude to learn SQL and it was better than me at it. And I'll never be better than Claude at SQL ever again.”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · October 2026
Ameisen says that when you hold together how simple the training objective is (predict the next token) and how capable the result is, you can react with denial or with curiosity. He chose curiosity, and this is the example he gives of why denial gets harder to sustain.
Transcript
…thing behaves is not like exactly like a human, but man, kind of like something that's mimicking a human is really close and is much closer than a program. Like, a program is a very predictive thing. This is something else entirely. And so, that's why I think it's actually a super useful frame.
…Oh, my God. There's so much interesting stuff there. How often is your mind just kind of blown thinking about basically we've created this alien being that we are now under trying to understand what we have created? How often, as you watch, you're just like, wow, that's crazy. I didn't expect that.
…the next word. It's not possible that you could ever match the best specialists in our field. And I think that position just gets harder and harder as we get more empirical evidence that actually that is what's happening. And curiosity is kind of the road I've ended up choosing, right? Which is just like, well, how is this happening? Let's open up. Let's look inside. How could it be that one of the early projects I did at Anthropic is I learned SQL, a programming language, and it took me years to master. And then as a little side project, I got Claude to learn SQL and it was better than me at it. And I'll never be better than Claude at SQL ever again. And it took it, you know, just like this, this kind of like simple process. How could this be? And I think there's so much depth in that question and just so much to explore. And it's to me so fascinating to just every day try to unpack that, try to sort of like peel a few layers of the onions back. Like, okay, well. Clearly, this is happening. The simple objective is giving rise to this super…
Wow. Something that comes up as you say that is what's interesting now is AI is helping us learn and evolve and progress, like AI tutoring and all these things. Just like it's interesting how it now is helping us accelerate our own understanding of the world. And I wonder if like this point you…
Hopefully we don't change it just so that we ask, we get students who are like, hey, here's a thousand words. Predict the next one. Just read it all. Keep
it all in your head.
More from Lenny's Newsletter
