We’re partnering with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI—part of our recent commitment to embed evaluators at Anthropic. Both we and Accenture expect to invest at least $1 billion to build capacity in this area over the next five years.

My goal was to record a conversation completely free of "AI doomer" takes as a timeline cleanser. For this episode, I interviewed Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) who is a video game developer and programming creator also known for his talks about the history of computing. In this episode: • Surprising findings in computer history • Where bad code comes from • The only unbreakable law in software engineering • His career in the video game industry • Why you should read technical papers Where to watch: • YouTube - • Spotify - • Apple Podcasts - • Transcript - Thank you to the sponsors of this episode for supporting my work: • Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:08 Digging into computer science history 04:08 What shocked him 16:23 Dijkstra was depressed 26:17 The personal side of goto considered harmful 35:09 The anatomy of a 35 year mistake 50:12 Clean code horrible performance 58:33 How to write high performance code 01:01:18 Where bad code comes from 01:06:37 Why design docs before code is a bad idea 01:09:20 The only unbreakable law in software engineering 01:15:57 How he got into programming 01:21:16 Why he didnt work in big tech 01:30:44 Should you work at a startup early on 01:34:52 What video game engineering is like 01:39:57 Why preventing recursion is reasonable 01:43:24 Is vibe coding bad for the industry 01:50:17 Technical reading recommendation 01:54:27 Advice for his younger self 01:56:54 Outro

A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.

We gamers got extremely lucky in the past 3 decades. Microchips are the most advanced architecture humans have built. Big companies like Intel and Nvidia were building the biggest chips for us. Hardware was measured by gaming performance. But professional demand has exploded and they have 10x higher budget: First we got cloud and virtual machines ($10k server CPUs) and now AI ($50k AI GPUs). Biggest leading edge chips will go to professional use, while we gamers have to content with smaller/older chips. Devs can't assume that gaming HW gets 2x faster every 2 years. PS5 launched at $399 5 years ago. Today the Steam Machine is slightly slower, but has 2.5x price tag. Back in the day we would have expected 10x performance bump in 5 years at the same price.