Posted by theahura 2 days ago
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
Maybe you have evidence otherwise?
They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
With respect to AI capabilities is it really?
I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.
It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.
[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
Not for the EU. Given the political importance of LLMs and the talent pool in France (let alone rest of the EU), I fully expect them to catch up.
Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b
Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.
If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.
I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
This is going to be studied for many, many generations to come.
This technology is not new and has been around since well before the internet.
And, on other side of coin, it is more great publicity.