00:00I can't think of a Claude that I know that is American, but how common was Claude as a name
00:05before all this anthropic stuff?
00:07So Claude in the U.S. is a very uncommon name.
00:10Most of the Claude's that I spoke to were named for great-great-grandfathers or because their parents were real
00:16Francophiles and loved Claude Monet.
00:19And so you actually don't meet a lot of Claude's who've ever met other Claude's.
00:24A few of the Claude's I talked to, the only time they had encountered another Claude was, like, randomly at
00:30karaoke when they were 45.
00:32And so for them, hearing their name be used kind of in the common parlance is really uncommon and a
00:38little bit jarring.
00:39They're now going through what I imagine the limited number of series went through a few years back, having this
00:45become a really ubiquitous name.
00:47What has it been like, broadly speaking, for them to see the name Claude all over the place, hear people
00:51invoking it?
00:52What's it been like for them?
00:53I think it's been very strange.
00:56One of the Claude's that I spoke to said he was coming down the escalator at the airport and there
01:00was just a huge sign with his name on it.
01:03And his first thought was, like, oh, that must be for me.
01:07Because it never occurred to him that there would be something else with his name on it.
01:11It has to be especially weird because of what you were saying.
01:14Because I feel like if you're a certain generation, if you were a Jennifer or a Jessica or a Christina
01:18or a Sarah, there were always, like, four of you in the class.
01:20But to your point, these are Claude's that have usually been pretty singular in their world.
01:24So they are probably pretty triggered to hear their name because they assume it's got to be me.
01:29Who else has this kind of rare name?
01:31Yeah, when you grow up with an unusual name, you develop a kind of a sense of singularity around it.
01:37It's a much more intrinsic part of your identity.
01:39I think John's and Matt's and Mike's are very used to tuning out their name to some degree or expecting
01:45a kind of clarification.
01:47But for Claude's, they're pretty much used to Claude always referring to them.
01:51So they're very heightened to respond to their name.
01:55When they hear it, they always just assume that it must be for them.
01:59And so they're really learning this new process of filtering out whether or not something is intended for them.
02:05What did they say about dealing with the connotations of this?
02:09So I think people have opinions about AI broadly.
02:11We've seen the whole back and forth between the Pentagon and Anthropic about the use of Claude and other AI
02:17models for national security issues.
02:20People have opinions about AI.
02:23How is that coloring the way that human Claude's lead their lives?
02:26Yeah, people definitely have opinions.
02:28Something like 50% of Americans are more afraid of AI than excited about it.
02:32And so for Claude's, it was really a mixed bag.
02:35Some of them are familiar with Claude.
02:38Some of them use Claude and have been impressed with it.
02:41They like that, at least in its marketing materials, Anthropic really emphasizes its focus on ethics.
02:47But then others have a little bit of skepticism about what it could mean.
02:52The headlines around the Pentagon and Pete Hezgeth wanting to have more autonomy over Claude
02:58and to use it as a kind of tool in Warcraft made a number of the Claude's anxious about what
03:04Claude could come to mean.
03:06If Claude, the AI, was operating autonomous weapons, they would feel very differently about it than if it was just
03:13kind of a cute coincidence in a work meeting.
03:16I love that we're referring to the Claude's in their plural form.
03:20You also talked about how, because it is a less common name, sometimes people don't know how to pronounce it.
03:25And you talked to a singular Claude who said for most of his life, people struggled with it.
03:30They didn't understand where it came from.
03:31They misspelled it on the Starbucks cup.
03:33And people would say my name and he would say like Claude Monet or like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
03:38And he says, now I say like Claude AI.
03:40So, I mean, maybe that's one good thing to come out of it for the Claude's as a group.
03:44Yeah, I'd never talked about Jean-Claude Van Damme as much as I did when I was reporting this story.
03:49I mean, Jean-Claude Van Damme is always fun.
03:51That's always going to be a good time.
03:52But he was the real cultural reference point that a lot of Claude's had to use to explain how to
03:57spell their name.
03:57I think a lot of Claude's got used to their names being misspelled on restaurant reservations, coffee cups.
04:04People would spell it Claude, Claude, Claude, like Jean-Aude, yeah.
04:09And for them, there is a sense of satisfaction around having people actually recognize the name for the first time
04:15and have kind of a bucket in which to put it so that it becomes more memorable.
04:21I talked to a few Claude's who have benefited from people being familiar with the name.
04:26It's kind of brought them more business because people remember the name.
04:30Interesting.
04:30And people in general at the moment have a fairly positive association with Claude AI,
04:36and so they're kind of benefiting from a little bit of a PR glow around the name Claude.
04:41Very quickly, you do seek out why Anthropic chose the name Claude.
04:45What did the company say, and indeed, what did Claude, AI Claude, say about its namesake?
04:51So that remains a mystery.
04:54I asked Claude AI, and it said that it didn't know Claude.
04:59Anthropic has never formally released an explanation for why they chose the name.
05:03There's some speculation that it's alliterative with the cloud.
05:08It's a vaguely human-sounding name.
05:10It's not that common, so you're not going to confuse it constantly with, like,
05:15it would be very strange to have an AI named Mike, perhaps, because it would be a little bit overwhelming.
05:21But there is some speculation that the Claude, the AI, made that it could be for Claude Shannon,
05:28who is a mathematician who's kind of credited as being a father of modern computing.
05:33But really, we don't know.
05:35It's one of the great mysteries of our time.
05:37And we don't know what this will mean long-term for the Claudes, but I wish them well.
05:42Yes.
05:42We wish them well.
05:43I wish them well, too.
05:45My favorite Claude, I know I'm not supposed to have a favorite Claude,
05:48but my favorite Claude was this 85-year-old man in France who actually was a father of modern computing.
05:54He wrote some of the software that was on the first Mac computers.
05:58And one thing he told me is he's really excited about AI.
06:01He uses four or five AI companions to help him with various—he's an early adopter, you might say.
06:07Yeah, that's awesome.
06:07He's excited about tech.
06:08And he said that spending a career in technology has given him a sense that people are always afraid of
06:14things that are new and disruptive.
06:16And in general, we trend towards the positive.
06:19So he's really optimistic about what Claude could come to mean.
06:22So he's really optimistic about it.
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