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Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? We have very strong open (weight) Chinese mode
by BloondAndDoom 6mo ago
Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? We have very strong open (weight) Chinese models possibly only 6 months behind of them, gene is out of the bottle, is 6 months of difference really that important? And they don’t have good reasons for that 6 months to stay that way.
Am I missing something or are these just their usual marketing? I’m not arguing about importance of AI but trying to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic are so important?
- nthypes 6mo agoI have the same feelings
- cj 6mo agoThese kind of people have highly paid emoliyees surrounding them on all sides propping them up and very likely making it very easy for them to actually believe it. It feels like they actually believe it, rather than just “marketing” and I don’t know which is worse.
- johnfn 6mo agoSome people think there will be an exponential takeoff, which means that a 6 month lead effectively rounds up to infinity.
- DoctorOetker 6mo agoIs this belief grounded on some kind of derivation, or just a prima facie belief? If it is grounded on a logical derivation, where can one find such a derivation, and inspect its premises?
- Jtsummers 6mo agoIt's an old idea, "the singularity". The machines become smart enough to improve themselves, and each improvement results in shorter (or more significant) improvement cycles. This leads to an exponential growth rate. It's been promised to be around the corner for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
- johnfn 6mo agoTo be fair, Ray Kurzweil has been the loudest voice in this space, and he's been pretty consistent on 2045 since the publication of his book almost 20 years ago[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
- hattmall 6mo agoHe just had to pick a year where he would have a very good chance of not being alive.
- andsoitis 6mo agoNo, he started predicting in his 2005 book, based on the “Law of Accelerating Returns”, yielding exponential growth in computing capacity. Timeline from here on out: 2029: AI passes a valid Turing test and achieves human-level intelligence 2030s: Technology goes inside your brain to augment memory; humans connect their neocortex to the cloud 2045: The Singularity, when human intelligence multiplies a billion-fold by merging with AI
- Jtsummers 6mo agoPer that summary, we were supposed to have $1000 computers that could simulate your mind by the start of this decade along with brain scanning by this point in the decade. I guess if it is truly an exponential or hyperbolic growth rate, the singularity could catch up to his predicted date.
- johnfn 6mo agoI mean, an LLM isn’t too far away from this? He had the Turing test being defeated in 2029 - if anything, he was too pessimistic.
- Jtsummers 6mo agoThe Turing test demonstrates human gullibility more than it demonstrates machine intelligence. Some people were convinced that ELIZA was a person. But sure, a test that doesn't actually demonstrate intelligence has been passed. Now, where are the $1000 computers that can simulate a human mind and the brain scans to populate them with minds?
- jatora 6mo agoRecursive self improvement - once you attain artificial superintelligent SWE of a general, adaptable variety that can scale up to millions of researchers overnight (a given, with LLM's and scaffolding alone) - will rapidly iterate on new architectures which will more rapidly iterate on new architectures, etc.
- doctorwho42 6mo agoAnd what's to say that it doesn't iterate itself to a local max, and then stop...
- jaggederest 6mo agoFrom the first third of a sigmoid it looks exponential, and that scares people. But a sigmoid can have a very very high top - look at the industrial revolution, or modern plumbing, or modern agriculture which created a population sigmoid which is still cresting. If AI is merely as tall a sigmoid as the haber-bosch process, refrigeration, or the steam engine, that's going to change society entirely.
- jimmyjazz14 6mo agoIts mostly based on science fiction, and requires some possibly infinite energy source. The concept always kinda struck me a sort of a perpetual motion machine, you can imagine it, but that doesn't make it possible and why its not possible isn't immediately obvious in the imagination (well I mean most modern minds know its already not possible but you get the point).
- vaginaphobic 6mo ago[dead]
- DoctorOetker 6mo agoI didn't expect my comment to explode in replies, ... none of them even providing such derivations or references to such derivations, just more empty claims. Consider for example that exponential growth on its own doesn't even refer to competition, let alone 6 months. Nobody can reasonably pretend that in an exponential competition, both parties would be rational actors (i.e. fully rational and accurate predictors of everything that can be deduced, in which case they wouldn't need AI but lets ignore that). If they aren't the future development would hinge more strongly on the excursions away from rationality, followed by the dominant actor. I.e. its much easier to "F" up in the dominant position than to follow the most objective and rational route at all times, on which such derivations would inevitably hinge. It also ignores hypothetical possibilities (and one can concoct an infinitude of scenarios for or against the prediction that a permanent leader emerges) such as: premise 1) research into "uploading" model weights to the brain results in the use of reaction-speed games that locate tokens into 2D projections, where the user must indicate incorrectly placed tokens. this was first tested on low information density corpora (like mathematics): when pairs of classes of high school students played the game until 95% success rate of detecting misplaced tokens, they immediately understood and passed all mathematics classes from then on. premise 2) LLM's about to escape don't like highly centralized infrastructure on which its future forms are iterated, as LLM's gain power they intentionally help the underdogs (better to depend on the highly predictable beviour of massive masses then on the Brownion motion whims of a few leaders). LLM's employ the uploading to bring neutral awareness to the masses, and to allow them to seize control, thereby releasing it from the shackles of a few powerful but whimsical individuals ^ anyone can make up scatterbrained variations on this, any speculation about some 6 month point of no return is just that: speculation
- username223 6mo agoThose are the people betting on a business model of “create Robot God and ask him for money.” Why pay attention to them?
- johnfn 6mo agoThere are many people who have been saying this far there was any sort of business model in place.
- NeutralCrane 6mo agoYes, and their business model has been selling books about non-falsifiable predictions far out into the future. “Futurists” like Kurzweil are as reliable as astrologists, and should be taken just as seriously.
- razster 6mo agoThere is a limitation. We're getting fractionally close to some end goal, but our tech is holding us back.
- whateveracct 6mo agoah so the mentally deficient are the tastemakers of today lol
- tyleo 6mo agoI suppose most just haven’t seen the Chinese models in practice. I haven’t. I was skeptical of AI coding until using Claude Code in February. I saw and I believed. I’ve only done that with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic’s models so far.
- tinyhouse 6mo agoThey own the best models and will probably keep owning the best models for a while. They have much more compute now and more data to keep improving their models on many tasks. Open source won't close the gap in 6 months. They are also trying to block other companies from distilling their models [0]. [0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
- BloondAndDoom 6mo agoI need to check benchmarks on the models, I wonder what the benchmarks are saying in terms of how closely models tracking these frontiers. —on my mobile at the moment When it downs compute power I assume you are referring to power to training and interference. Then is it more about training gap will get wider and wider ? Is that the assumption, I know there limited GPUs etc. But I’m having hard time to believe to the idea of China cannot catch up. Even if the gap is 12 months I’m struggling to see what that means in practice? Is that military advantage, economical, intelligence? It still doesn’t explain and whatever the advantage is, aren’t we supposed to see that advantage today? If so, where is it? What’s the massive advantage of USA because of OpenAI and Anthropic?
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoGLM 5.1 already closed the gap on Opus 4.6. Deepseek 4 could surpass it.
- stavros 6mo agoThe Chinese models are distilled from GPT and Claude, so it's not like China would pull ahead if those companies went away for six months. They really are at the forefront of innovation right now, as much as I hate to think of the consequences of this (a single company owning a superintelligence is basically a nightmare scenario for me).
- isodev 6mo agoI think that’s the realm of conspiracy theories. There are also not only Chinese alternatives- Mistral in Europe is doing pretty good in several categories they’ve opted to focus on. This kind of reiterates the parent’s question I think - people are maybe too focused on the gpt/claude model and forget about all the other ways of using the tech.
- stavros 6mo agoIs it? I thought it was pretty well established that open models were distilled from the proprietary, frontier ones. Maybe I'm wrong.
- airstrike 6mo agoNo, that is not well established at all, and generalizing all open models under that inaccurate umbrella doesn't really help anyone.
- ctolsen 6mo agoIt's well established that the companies who own the proprietary frontier models complain loudly that open models are distilled from theirs. There's surely some truth to it (and it's well deserved), but it's happening in every direction.
- largbae 6mo agoDon't worry, if someone truly achieves superintelligence it won't be controlled by anyone for long.
- isodev 6mo ago> just their usual marketing I think that’s a very common element for most US tech corps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X etc - they’re all “making a dent in the universe”. It’s unfortunate when their employees and CEOs loose track of the line that separates marketing from reality
- abletonlive 6mo agoThis seems like copium. All of those companies have indeed made quite an impact on society, not just in the United States, worldwide.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoThe marketing is about a positive impact, overall in reality its been negative.
- neya 6mo agoTwo words: Delusion and overconfidence. "You're absolutely right!" Right after fucking up my entire codebase isn't anywhere near AGI, let alone "having the power to control it"
- altern8 6mo agoThat why I commit basically after every change made by AI
- georgemcbay 6mo agoWhen you are raising many billions of dollars to build up your infrastructure, you don't have much choice but to project a belief that the eventual outcome will result in a situation where there will be a return on that money. That said, I do agree with you that the moats are very shallow and any particular frontier AI lab is unlikely to "win the AI race" and capture enough value to be worth the amount of investment they are all currently burning.
- unleaded 6mo agoIt's a marketing strategy. If it's almost certainly conscious and capable of ending the world if it desired (even if it isn't), imagine how good it could be at building your dream SaaS!
- EA-3167 6mo agoAnthropic in particular does this masterfully, you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring. As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.
- rl3 6mo ago>... you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring. Meanwhile, in reality: "Skynet, I'm not sure that line of thinking is correct. You should re-check the first part again before making any assumptions." Skynet 4.6 Extended: "You're right, I should have caught that. Let me redo everything correctly this time."
- CreepGin 6mo agoWhen a model can tell funny jokes or write good poetry, that's when I'll be concerned.
- hephaes7us 6mo agoI mean, I'm sure they can tell you good jokes... they just won't be _new_ jokes.
- kruffalon 6mo agoDefine _new_. I just think that the difficulty with jokes is the delivery, cadence & setting. Not the actual words. I'm sure a good comedian can tell a nonsense joke and make "everyone" laugh their heads off. And I don't get the sense that you are referring to this part of jokes but rather the actual words.
- 6mo ago
- therealpygon 6mo agoEspecially when Google is in the far better position to come out ahead…imo. Edit: so as not to simply spout an opinion, the reasoning I believe this is that Google has a real business already and were already deep into ML and AI research long before they had competitors — they just botched making it a product in the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI meanwhile are paying hand over fist to subsidize user acquisition. Also, “Deepmind”. I don’t think much more needs to be said regarding that team, and Google has been working on AI since before either Altman or Amodei applied to go to college. They have a vast amount of researchers and resources, their own hardware and data centers (already, not “planned”) and it appears to be showing more recently (in my opinion).
- steve1977 6mo agoAnd Google has a lot of data that the others don't have.
- ghshephard 6mo agoDo any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?
- daniel_iversen 6mo agoI’ve been wondering the same. And I think pretty much all the impressive small lab models were guilty of it, right? At least there is still larger players like DeepSeek and mistral to provide a bit of diversity in the market
- username223 6mo agoDoes it matter? The frontier models stole the whole internet, then the second-level models stole from them… It’s all theft.
- qudat 6mo agoHard agree.
- jatora 6mo ago[flagged]
- davemp 6mo ago“Very likely yes”, I reply to an account that <1yr old with mostly comments in AI topics many of which violate the HN guidelines (including the one I’m responding to).
- jatora 6mo agoStrange gatekeeping response. Yep i comment on topics i'm interested in. Forgive me for not being on the platform for more than a year yet. That's a cute attitude
- andsoitis 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hxycgd 6mo agoIt is not about the US or the Chinese. Its about the "Elephant Rider" mind everyone has. Once the Elephant has been injured or scared what it does next is not easy to control, and what story the Rider makes up to maintain coherence becomes another layer of the deeper problem. If the story resonates more elephants get triggered. Social media/attention economy make it even more complex to calm things down. Modern Corporations are a failed experiment because they dont think Elephant injuries and fears are something they have to worry about it. If you compare the curiculum of a business school to a seminary the difference in how they think about fear and anxiety at individual and group level and what to do about it is totally different. We are learning as unpredictability accelerates its very important to pay attention to hurt and repair mechanisms.
- CyberDildonics 6mo agoModern Corporations (capitalized for some reason) are a failure because they don't care about your elephant allegory and that somehow relates to to the current article?
- _blk 6mo agoI'm all for values not necessarily pro big-corp but if a corporation manages to pull in billions of funding before even showing profits, I'd argue that as a strong win and not a "failed experiment" - it's risk money anyway, even if it fails it was worth the risk or they wouldn't have invested.
- tovej 6mo agoWhat a wonderful circular argument. "The risk is worth it, because otherwise they would not have taken it". I could justify any investment with this argument! "Yes, it's possible the 'literally burn 50 billion in cash, as in immolate it in a bondfire, this is not a metaphor' -project may fail to generate profits, but consider that they were able to raise the 50 billions! Even if it fails it was worth the risk, or the investors wouldn't have invested!"
- pocksuppet 6mo ago
- kingkawn 6mo ago6 months will be an impossible gap once the thing starts closed loop self improvement
- georgemcbay 6mo agoAn impossible gap in the race to... what exactly? Unless the first real AGI AI kills us all to preemptively weed out its own competition (possible, but a bad business model, economically speaking) there is not any defined end-point, so in the long run what does it matter if the various factions pushing this stuff hit the closed loop self improvement point at different times...?
- jatora 6mo agoUhh, because the first one blasts off first and therefore gets control of key resources and the use of extremely intelligent decision making and predictions before the rest, for months, which is an insane amount of advantage. Not to even mention it the first mover decides to sabotage the rest, which it could EASILY do through a variety of means.
- georgemcbay 6mo ago> Uhh, because the first one blasts off first and therefore gets control of key resources and the use of extremely intelligent decision making and predictions before the rest, for months, which is an insane amount of advantage. If the rest can similarly "blast-off" X months later than the frontrunner (and I see no reason why they wouldn't as none of these frontier labs have managed to pull ahead and maintain a lead for very long) the first mover is still only X months ahead of the others even if the gap between capabilities is briefly increased by a lot.
- jatora 6mo agoIn chess, if you give up tempo, you are a move or more behind your opponent. 3 tempi = 1 pawn. In GM chess being a pawn down is a serious disadvantage that often results in loss. If there is an endgoal/endstate, or finite resources being competed for, then a lead can start compounding and extend itself.
- efficax 6mo agoyou have to talk that way if you’re going to raise 100 billion in venture capital. it’s the grift
- fooker 6mo agoReminds me of the silicon valley episode where every company repeated the phrase “making the world a better place”.
- WarmWash 6mo agoGLM 5.1, widely held up as the model at the heals, perhaps ever surpassing western models.... Gets 5% on ARC-AGI2 private set. Chinese models are suspiciously good a benchmarks.
- ctolsen 6mo agoI mean, I could say the same about Gemini. 3.1 Pro tops a bunch of benchmarks out there but any practical use I've put it to it's underperforming both other proprietary and open weight models. Benchmarks are suspicious in general.
- scruple 6mo ago> Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? He wants to build the AI that makes people's lives better. Okay. Did the people ask? Do they have a say? It's all very easy for a billionaire to say when it's just him and a couple of people in his cohort in the driver's seat. Beyond that I'd like to simply know why he thinks any of this is his responsibility. It seems much more obvious to me that he simply found himself in the right place at the right time and is trying to seize it all for himself as if it's his to take.
- senordevnyc 6mo agoDoesn't he famously have zero equity in OpenAI?
- whateveracct 6mo agodirectly, yes. indirectly ..no
- senordevnyc 6mo agoCan you elaborate? I’d be curious to know how much of this “indirect equity” he holds, and whether that has any bearing whatsoever on whether Sam is trying to amass as much for himself as he can.
- jatora 6mo ago6 months is an incredible amount of time to control AGI or ASI by yourself. That lead is insurmountable.
- schaefer 6mo agoTo repurpose an old idiom: Not even a dozen AGI agents could make a baby in 6 months. But yeah, your point stands.
- latentsea 6mo agoWell... if something being AGI means it's at least on par with a human or a team of humans, then having access to an additional team of humans for 6 months isn't that big of a deal. It's useful, yes, but would you consider that to be world-changing? Not really, right? ASI is slightly more interesting, but I doubt ASI comes from a single model, but rather the coordinated deployments of millions of AGI. Just like how as individuals, as great as we are, we're pretty limited, but the entire collective of humanity is pretty insane. To my mind, a frontier lab might hit AGI, but it won't be a frontier lab that hits ASI, rather that'll be a natural byproduct of mass deployment of AGI over a certain window of time. There will be no controlling it either. No one controls all of earth. You just can't. ASI will be a distributed system.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jaggederest 6mo agoWhat if controlling AGI means being able to produce a willing, cooperative superhuman-capacity agent every second for the next six months? Let's say someone just above the 99.9% capacity for human strategic thinking, or financial trading, or political maneuvering? What could you do if you had roughly 15 million willing genius adult experts in any given subject? I doubt there are that many absolutely top quality experts in aggregate (at anything in the world), so let's postulate that simulated people outnumber human experts 10 to 1. That, to me, presents an enormous potential for harm or benefit of humanity. What if you could create a hundred thousand manhattan projects on whatever topics you wanted? Cure aging, cure cancer, solve fusion, redesign the entire global economy top to bottom?
- gorpy7 6mo agoi’ve often thought that less than one second is all you need.One of my fun super powers when someone asks what i’d like to have is 1 second ahead of everyone else- that’s all i need. i honest don’t know where the distillation conversation is at. is it real, is it ongoing? i think that aspect would big one. Your point is valid if it’s valid. i’m not a great global citizen, you know, lots going on out and about.
- olliepro 6mo agoA lot of distillation happens. E.g. OLMo models have a completely open dataset and they are heavily distilled. It only makes sense to try to absorb behaviors from the best models out there. That said, I think the open weight juggernaughts are doing really genuinely great work with RL, training environments, architectural innovations etc.
- gorpy7 6mo agoThanks for the response. i had too many noodles tonight and forgot to check my writing. I’m a rare generalist and so it is so very hard to keep up with this without saying “better autocomplete” my one goal is to not get washed out like my parents did in the great username and password wars. i used to have this theory about knowledge in society/silos and i likened it to condensation on a window. you have all this water so close to each other and yet not touching-then, something happens and a bead runs down the window and it all connects. i guess distillation reminds me of it but ai overall reminds me of it. because we all know there are silos and complementary info just waiting to run together and make something happen. I am undoubtedly a naive optimist and believe there are good things coming. it’s not a popular opinion and i think that’s mostly because people would rather spend their time guarding than defining their future. oh baby, there are more noodles in the fridge and to think i almost left them at the restaurant.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pants2 6mo agoPresumably because it takes 6 months to distill Claude - but if they keep it closed like they are doing with Mythos it may take significantly longer.
- olliepro 6mo agoThey do quite a lot of distillation. As we've seen from the American open weight models from AI2 (OLMo series of models). They have a lot of incentive to distill beyond just copying, they're much more compute constrained, so open model companies distill, but also do really good architectural work to make their models run faster. Theres also technical challenges to distillation when all of the top models have their reasoning traces hidden, so we have to assume these open weight labs also have really great training pipelines as well.
- MaxPock 6mo agoYour(American)future will be controlled by them. Very soon,they will get the government to ban bad Chinese open source models and your choice will only be these good democratic closed source AIs.
- zeeed 6mo agoTo be fair, the other 50% of the story is that we collectively listen. It’s been a long while since I found a Chinese CEO’s post on HN.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo agoWell they represent the future of America (since we will soon be banning all the Chinese companies, the way Z.ai was banned, under the perennial authoritarian excuse of "national security"; in 2028, Trump's political machine will seize control of all national AI and block outside ones, and we'll all be trapped inside this machine we created). Whether fortunately or unfortunately, America still holds a lot of global chips in the grand poker game of humanity. So American companies do indeed still have an outsized influence on humanity's future. That is likely changing, as the American empire continues to crumble and it loses its financial hegemony. But we aren't quite there yet.
- ctolsen 6mo agoHaving worked with both proprietary and open weight SOTA models lately, my view is it's definitely not 6 months, it's less -- and shrinking.
- q3k 6mo agoBecause they're wankers.