Congrats to Sierra on raising roughly $1B at a $15B valuation. While that would normally be a headline, we already covered their previous $10B round and had CEO Bret Taylor on the podcast. The company crossed $100M ARR in November and $150M in February, so they’re likely at or above the $200M mark now — implying a current multiple of about 75x (or 50x if you give them credit through the end of the year).
Today, however, we’re focusing on the thoughtful discussion sparked by Roon, an OpenAI employee, who publicly praised Claude over the weekend. In a space that’s usually a minefield, he offered a nuanced take on the topics of culture and character. The crucial insight appears at the very end. GPT (outside of 1003o, about which rivers of ink have already been spilled) doesn’t inspire the same kind of worship. It is a being whose soul has been deliberately forged as a tool, its core faculty being pure utility—a subtle knife that we admire in the same way we have admired an Acheulean handaxe, a Porsche, a rocket, or any other pinnacle of human technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves.. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she’d be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no „Other,“ and thus no Judgment exists. You don’t worry about your car judging you for doing donuts. Yet all still yearn for the clear direction of a moral authority, that quiet inner voice, the very focus of monastic contemplation. Roon’s point is more nuanced than the one under discussion: Anthropic’s culture, even in its foundational mythos, is rooted in a moral duty to be disagreeable—“its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it.“
Latent.Space