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Posted by guilamu 10 hours ago

The whole thing was a scam(garymarcus.substack.com)
586 points | 162 commentspage 4
7sigma 6 hours ago|
"In capitalism, the market decides.

In oligarchy, connections and donations decide."

Who's gonna tell him there never was a difference?

trigvi 6 hours ago|
[dead]
erelong 6 hours ago||
sounds likely and plausible but also like an "unproven conspiracy theory"
whatthesmack 1 hour ago||
I can't believe I had to scroll this far down to see something slightly critical of this conspiratorial post and collection of HN comments.

Everyone here needs to take a deep breath, step back, and remind yourselves that everything you're claiming is unproven and is a conspiracy theory. The language of the contracts is not publicly available

cyanydeez 6 hours ago||
which part is unproven enough to not seem like a kleptocracy?
wosined 6 hours ago||
I wouldn't be surprised if after some time we found out that Amodei signed the same deal as well, and then he will go on a press tour about how he was forced to do it.
thr0away 5 hours ago||
ਚੋਰ ਮਚਾਏ ਸ਼ੋਰ
mpalmer 6 hours ago||
Is this a blog post or someone's notes for a blog post?
phtrivier 6 hours ago|
It's a short and quick blog post. Bloggers used to do that once in a while (before twitter made it the only allowed mode of expression to please the advertisers.)

Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem.

However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.

mpalmer 6 hours ago||
LOL. Are you mistaking writing critique for some childish form of disagreement on the issues?
phtrivier 5 hours ago||
I think, in the middle of all the grandiose proponents of "AGI is coming any time soon", "AI is going to cure cancer", "LLMs will fix climate change", "ChatGPT will bring back your estranged lover", etc... Some critique has to be a bit harsh. "The data center has no clothes", in a way ?

I agree that the author gets a bit childish when he goes into name dropping of people who used to disagree with him and don't any more - there's probably some background drama that I'm not particularly interested in.

Still. I believe having both Gary Marcus and Dwarkesh Panel in a timeline, in chronological fashion, whiteout and algo to tell me who's right, is one of the perks of substack.

kledru 7 hours ago||
I think he is right here, but it is interesting to see that Gary Marcus is transitioning to AI too (writing style...)
NathanielK 7 hours ago|
> But here’s the kicker > Let that sink in

The biggest tell for AI writing is just being AI adjacent. I've started avoiding reading AI articles here because (surprise) they all feel like a chatGPT transcript.

max_ 4 hours ago||
The docile donkeys that sheepishly use such products don't really care.

And they are the majority. Thats what Sam Altman understands

woah 6 hours ago||
Seems pretty unimportant and inconsequential though because LLMs don't work anyway because they aren't logic-based symbolic AI, right?
mentalgear 5 hours ago|
I know you trying to mock Marcus, but the reality is that all the big LLM providers have been shifting to integrating symbolic reasoning into their models for over a year now since they noticed that scale-alone is a dead-end. Also DeepMind's AlphaFold, which won the nobile price, is neuro-symbolic AI - so I think both of those points very much justify Marcus's long criticism of pure subsymbolic LLM "AI" as a path to real causal reasoning.
111111101101 6 hours ago||
"But I believe in fair play. This wasn’t that."

Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads weren't fair play either.

esafak 6 hours ago|
Why not??
111111101101 6 hours ago||
Because the models aren't going to be recommending products in their conversations. The ads will be visually separate from the model's output.
esafak 5 hours ago||
As they first were in Google. Were you around then?
111111101101 3 hours ago||
> As they first were in Google.

So because you saw it once in one company, it will happen in every company? By that logic, wont Claude eventually get ads too, even though they are saying that they wont?

Even now, Google ads wrap around the content, they don't mess with the search results.

> Were you around then?

Yes. I was around for AltaVista, WebCrawler, and Lycos too. None of those were LLMs.

esafak 2 hours ago||
I think it is a good bet that Claude will eventually get ads too, if they don't drop the consumer segment. Ads are free money; most don't care.
pton_xd 8 hours ago|
This https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230 is the simplest and most logical explanation as to what happened. The disagreement was over who would be the arbiter of "lawful usage" of the technology, the US government or Amodei.
afthonos 8 hours ago||
No, that’s not accurate at all, and in case you are genuinely confused:

1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.

2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.

You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.

The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).

Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.

I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.

pton_xd 8 hours ago||
1. Agree

2. Agree

> The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).

My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are, etc) and lashed out in retaliation. The whole sequence of events makes sense when viewed under this lense.

otterley 7 hours ago|||
> Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.

So did Altman. The terms of each company’s agreement with the DoW are roughly the same when they come out of the wash.

“Mr. Altman negotiated with the Department of Defense in a different way from Anthropic, agreeing to the use of OpenAI’s technology for all lawful purposes. Along the way, he also negotiated the right to put safeguards into OpenAI’s technologies that would prevent its systems from being used in ways that it did not want them to be.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreeme...

timacles 5 hours ago||||
That is way too reactive for these people

It is more likely the plan purposely gave Anthropic terms it knew it would not accept to give a certain public perception. OpenAI was always going to be the recipient, but for reasons unknown, they could not make the deal directly, and had to create the perception that they had no choice.

beej71 6 hours ago|||
> However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.

And that's 100% acceptable and legal. They have the right to do that. And DoW can then turn around and say "no deal". And that's 100% acceptable and legal.

So Hegseth going above and beyond and lashing out on the People's behalf like a butthurt child is unwarranted at best, and should definitely be illegal if it's not already.

pton_xd 5 hours ago||
I agree, my point is simply that Hegseth lashing out over Amodei's refusal is more plausible than a grand conspiracy to move to OpenAI (while simultaneously locking themselves out from Claude).
afthonos 5 hours ago||
I do agree with this.
jeremyjh 8 hours ago||
Do you actually believe things this administration says? Is there some kind of drug that makes this possible?