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.
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.
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.
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
The Mythos marketing strategy in action
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.
Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
For some time now, I've felt this gap across communities and platforms to truly articulate why American corporations, capitalism and American prosperity need the rule of law.
Lately, the US government has been consistently defying the rule of law and adherence to due process; this is the fruit of that poisoned tree.
If members of the Government can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, a company whose products are an issue of "national security" and has been designated a "supply chain risk?"
Perhaps it's a threat that could be alleviated by better "oversight" via certain parties who just happen to be connected to certain members of the Government...
This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."
You might be in one moment. You won't be in the next.
Ask Jack Ma. How has he been doing lately?
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/china-alibaba-crack...
https://www.wired.com/story/jack-ma-isnt-back/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...
The grave sin that Jack Ma committed for which he forfeited years of his life, billions of dollars and control of his company?
He disagreed with the regime. Publicly. Called the regulators geriatrics.
The Financial Times reported that the disappearance may have been connected to a speech given at the annual People's Bank of China financial markets forum,[41] in which Ma criticized China's regulators and banks.[41] Ma described state banks as operating with a pawn shop mentality and criticized the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly."
Ant Group made major changes to its ownership structure and corporate governance in January 2023.[42]: 261 That month, Ant Group announced a series of changes in shareholder voting rights,
with Ma no longer the actual controller of Ant Group.[50]
Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%.[42]: 271
Following these changes, no single shareholder has a controlling stake in the company.[42]: 261 The company's board also added another independent director.[42]: 261
The Chinese government spoke positively of Ant Group's changes, including describing them as improvements in transparency and accountability
The US is now dutifully following the same trajectory.
The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business used to be underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms.
It's just how the incentives shape out.
Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.
People respond to incentives; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713798
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
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.
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...
After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
The Republican Party is built on the same stupid idea you are promoting here, the idea that government is inherently bad and evil, and as a result of these beliefs, Republicans are only capable of creating bad and evil government. It's the only vision of government they understand, so of course it is what they manifest. But only a stupendously ignorant idiot like Trump would think that is the only viable vision of government, because you have to ignore thousands of years of history and volumes of contemporary evidence showing how government can do good in the world. By, for example, regulating dangerous things so we don't die when idiots like yourself get your hands on them.
Trump's stupidity, incompetence, and recklessness are not proof government is evil, they are proof that idiots who promote idiotic ideologies like yours are, not coincidentally, remarkably incompetent at running governments. It is not worth listening to the opinions of arsonists on how we should run the fire department. So kindly shut the fuck up, you are too fucking stupid to contribute to the conversation.
Cider9986•1h ago