13 ms·

The Closing of the Frontier

189 points by MindGods 6mo ago

cyanydeez 6mo ago
if it is an actual leap, expect more 90% is good enough open weights to hit the next 6 months. Theres no reason competitors will hold underperforming models if they have to retool. might as well do more marketing.
randallsquared 6mo ago
> But it is another thing entirely to share access only with enterprise partners such as Crowdstrike, Cisco, and Microsoft, which are known to have massive security incidents regularly. The stated purpose of Glasswing is to give infra and security orgs the chance to close holes and improve their security. In that context, it seems odd to call for not providing them access with the justification being that they have security breaches sometimes. Mythos may or may not itself be opened to the public at some point, but I would charitably expect that Anthropic plans that a future model at least as good as Mythos Preview will be, and the limited release for Mythos is intended to make that eventuality safer by having most of the existing holes patched.
- somnic 6mo ago
  I can understand the frustration with giving away this tool to companies with poorer security practices than their importance warrants, same as frustrations with bailouts. It means they don't really face the full consequences of underinvestment in security. Not to say it's a bad idea, but it does feel unjust.
keybored 6mo ago
> The Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly available vs those reserved for the already wealthy and pre-established. The Internet was developed by the US state sector and handed off to the private sector in the 90’s. Then it worked as an open space until it didn’t any more. Predictably driven by corporate interests. > In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that much that is distinctive about America was shaped by the existence of free land to the West where anyone could start over, and that this condition infused America with its characteristic liberty, egalitarianism, rejection of feudalistic hierarchy, self-sufficiency, and ambition. A more asinine comparison could not have been picked.
pizzly 6mo ago
Maybe not. You stated "Every country will pursue it as far as it can, and given the multipolar world we are back in, and our recent record with treaties and commitments, I do not believe there will be global alignment on risk reduction" and that is true. While Anthropic may hold of releasing Mythos I don't think they will for long. As long as there is someone somewhere in the world that releases a competing model then Anthropic will be forced to release Mythos. This also assumes that its not a marketing tactic from Anthropic in the first place, build suspense before releasing it. I would like to see more countries capable of producing frontier models. At the moment we have two in the world but many countries are building their own national models and AI infrastructure and may join the race. Having a multipolar world may actually result in more freedom in gaining access to frontier models.
cortesoft 6mo ago
This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me. Give it a few months and it will be just another model they are selling, but the NEWER model is just too powerful for the public.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
    Back in 2019, OpenAI delayed the release of GPT-2, stating "fake news generation and potential misuse". I guess we have those in buckets now?
- jabedude 6mo ago
  This happened before with GPT-2 being touted as "too dangerous to release"[0] at the time by OpenAI. I don't think that means every model will be safe to release in the future, but nothing I've read about Mythos seems like it's going to be different this time. [0]: https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    It's going to be a slightly better Opus. Every model released by any provider since 4o has been a modest improvement but over-hyped. Opus 4.6 included. I believe they are starting to split hairs and the primary lever left is adding compute.
    - enejej 6mo ago
      Yeah the only thing that will be left is to scale up compute and pray it creates escape velocity. Which frankly has been Sam’s whole thesis in raising money.
- 6mo ago
OldGreenYodaGPT 6mo ago
The problem is Anthropic doesn't have the compute to deploy this model to scale to everyone yet. Dario didn't believe that they needed as much compute, OpenAI is going to have much more compute unlocked this year and especially next year.
- avaer 6mo ago
  This is the real reason it's not out. Great to see they were able to spin their lack of resources and money losing business model into an abundance of benevolence and concern for the proletariat.
- DrProtic 6mo ago
  Let’s say the model is indeed groundbreaking but needs much more compute that they have, I wonder would merging Anthropic and OpenAI be on the table.
  - contraposit 6mo ago
    On the efficiency side, why do we need 10 companies doing the same thing. "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle would agree with your proposal.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      Hello. We have detected your account has breached our terms of service. Your account has been banned. There is no recourse for this actions. As we all well know this message is great when there one or two private providers that can kick you from an entire market with no way of challenging them.
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    It depends. If Mythos is AGI then OpenAI's charter says they have to merge with the winner.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
wyc 6mo ago
> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is now truer than it ever was.
- Ancalagon 6mo ago
  The point is it won’t be if these new models stay locked to the public.
  - bredren 6mo ago
    We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. I take a contra view and instead see this as fuel on the fire for tinkering to squeeze advanced functionality out of more available things. It has always been like this, the amateur improvising tooling and equipment to outdo companies with comparably infinite resources.
    - enraged_camel 6mo ago
      >> We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. This is false. Yesterday's article did not actually show this, and there are many comments in the discussion from actual security people (like tptacek) pointing that out.
      - bredren 6mo ago
        From what I can tell, this was not clearly settled. Your example author, actually corrected themselves saying LLMs “possibly” could perform successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696
        6mo ago
derektank 6mo ago
Most important point in the piece (though I’m not sure if the historical analogy to the grid holds, given local electricity production has been unavailable for the majority of the history of the grid) > You can generate your own electricity with a solar panel (think local models), but most people would rather pay a utility bill. And the power company doesn’t decide, on the basis of pedigree, who is worthy of electricity. Intelligence should work similarly, where the capabilities you can access scale may scale with vetting and due process, but the presumption should be access. Add safety guardrails to restrict dangerous use; start by making them overly trigger-happy if you must, and calibrate over time. But the default should be to allow entry.
- chr15m 6mo ago
  > most people would rather pay a utility bill What? All evidence points in the opposite direction.
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
I admit I didn't read the entire post (I honestly think authors really need to come to terms with the fact that we now live in a world of information excess, and pithiness is more important than ever), but I wouldn't feel too bad yet given there was a recent front page HN post about how free, open models could actually catch all the issues Mythos did, it just required a little more orchestration. E.g. see https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jag... for a detailed analysis.
- airza 6mo ago
  if an 1800 word post is just too long I think you are cooked. This is the nicest thing I can say on the subject.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
    It's not that 1800 words is too long, it's that I've seen probably 40-50 (at least) posts, analyses, and bloviations about Mythos since it came out. If the author doesn't very quickly get to why I should read their particular 1800 words over the other similar and competing tens of thousands of words on the subject, they are "cooked".
    - operatingthetan 6mo ago
      Open gemini chrome sidebar, type "sum." Watch the magic happen.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - notpachet 6mo ago
      They could just be writing for themselves, or their friends, or for people with the patience to read. You are making assumptions about how badly they want to reach your particular eyeballs. They might not care about trying to win over people with a minimal attention span as much as you think they do. What makes you think your comment was worth reading?
lowbloodsugar 6mo ago
In other, underreported news, companies like AirBnB are using open source models. Anthropic and OpenAI have a six months to year advantage over Qwen and other models. We reached the point a while ago where Anthropic models where good enough, and so now, inevitably, we’ve reached the point where open models are good enough. The boasting of models so good they can’t be shared was propaganda to frame the conversation. But for anyone paying attention, what matters is that open models are now good enough.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  Underrated comment. I think the future is actually quite bright, if we can continue to use open models, even if they are behind closed SOTA models they are still capable and will continue to improve.
simianwords 6mo ago
While I don't think Mythos is so powerful that it justifies containment permanently - I wonder how it might work when there is such an AI that can justify containment. What if this new model can start proving Millenial problems and provide insights in other fields that was not possible before? My intuition says that a model that is as good will also be equally well aligned -- but it is still highly risky to give it to the general public because all you need is one jailbreak from bad actors. At that point I think society would change so dramatically that "access to general public" would be a non issue. Rather, time would be spent on making abundance happen - you might think of the political struggles, economics and new ventures. Its a bit sad that democratised access is not provided because of negative sum possibilities like cybersecurity.
zkmon 6mo ago
You never needed a godzilla or a megatron to get on with your life. But the sellers of those monsters would make every attempt, in connivance with the authorities, to make it a basic necessity to use their services. That's a survival strategy for the monsters. The owners can't keep the monsters in cages for too long, even if the owner is a state actor.
fwipsy 6mo ago
The opportunity from the early days of the American frontier is not typical. Instead, it's the brief burst of unrestrained growth as a better-adapted organization (the US, software companies) expands into, and expands, a niche--cannibalizing the previous occupant (Native Americans, older stagnant companies.) At times growth is so rapid that individuals are able to advance the frontier, but if the field stagnates, individuals will be outcompeted by corporations. So, opportunity for individuals comes from disruption. Creative destruction is good up to a point, but it results from advancing capabilities. Technological advances compound and accelerate exponentially. Eventually we reach the point where any malcontent can destroy the world by snapping their fingers. At some point we need to place restrictions on the capabilities accessible to individuals. We have reached that point with nuclear weapons, and I think it is sensible to believe that AI is reaching that point as well.
- brunoborges 6mo ago
  > Yes, but today a 16-year-old building a unicorn is about as likely as winning the lottery. In today's world, a new digital service is more likely to be successful when attached to celebrities than from pure PLG / Marketing.
  - fwipsy 6mo ago
    Sorry, I removed that line from the comment because I realized it wasn't really in line with the rest of the point I was making.
- taurath 6mo ago
  Frontier mythology also hides quite a lot of tragedy and deaths too because of how many native Americans needed to die for it to be a frontier. It was not by any means unsettled land.
shevy-java 6mo ago
> Even though the American dream is nearly dead That dream was always a lie. But in the past, people could purchase more in parity. You only need to look at income versus housing cost in, say, Canada. Realistically there should not exist any superrich, but this seems hard to change. That means there needs to be a different society be given as promise. Other countries manage that. In the USA they have the orange oligarch who said a while ago how there is no money for health care because he has to invade countries and wage war. So much for the "no more wars" promise.
- suzzer99 6mo ago
  The American dream was not a lie if you come from a country with no economic opportunity, or where the govt can just steal your successful business at any time. It's still not dead in that regard, although it's seen better days.
oa335 6mo ago
I don’t understand this sentiment at all - the older models are still available and still highly capable.
hgoel 6mo ago
I interpreted their "too dangerous to release" comment as a statement about the current situation. If the model is truly as capable as they say, and the security issues so numerous, it makes sense to hold out until the biggest targets have been patched. It'd only take one company deciding to not worry about safety, to change the calculus back to "we have to release this to stay competitive".
rdedev 6mo ago
> already happening with recursive self improvement Are any AI labs claiming this?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
operatingthetan 6mo ago
I doubt that Mythos is just so wonderful and not able to be replicated that we are actually being 'closed off' from frontier models. For example, the people who Anthropic "trusts" with this "dangerous" model are a handful of fortune 500 companies? Seriously? Those are the people we trust? We are going to have access to this within 6 months, and if we don't, someone else will offer an equivalent. Anthropic hasn't walked to the edge of the abyss only to be like "let the CEO's handle this!" It is simply not the edge of the abyss.
atleastoptimal 6mo ago
I think we are going to look at the era between 2019-2025 as a very rare blip in the history of public AI access. Regardless of whether fears about Mythos end up being justified, the clear trend is 1. AI models are becoming better and better at causing massively disruptive effects, leaving up larger and larger liabilities, especially as laws and regulations are being passed/proposed which would put the responsibility of some mass disruption/hacking event on the company which serves the model that made it possible 2. The relative advantage of serving an AI model for inference in exchange for money is waning compared to the advantage of using that model internally for purposes which accrue money/power/leverage for that AI company. Why serve a model at 30 dollars/million tokens when you've discovered you can use that model to run a simulated Quant firm with a net profit of 300 dollars/million tokens? Why offer the model to companies so they can find zero-day exploits, when you can find them yourself and sell the discovery to companies which would may millions to avoid this exploit being taken advantage of? 3. Why serve models so another wrapper company like Cursor can make billions off your tokens, and then try to train their own models as fast as possible, trained on your outputs so they aren't dependent on you? The entire AI startup industry and like 90% of YC batches depend on being able to serve frontier models at a profit, mediated through some wrapper, why can't OpenAI/ANthropic, once their models are good enough to handle the ideation/organizational problem, become their own incubator for thousands of AI run startups, running on models way better than the public has access to? As a consequence, there is less and less incentive over time to offer models as an API to the public.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  > AI models are becoming better and better at causing massively disruptive effects Anthropic chose to use their model to find a bunch of vulnerabilities. People have used much smaller models since to find the same issues. We are being set up to have certain pre-concieved notions about this model. Ripping away AI access from the public at this point would be catastrophic for the world economy. It's just not happening.
willworktill4pm 6mo ago
I'm old enough to remember claims that gpt-2 is too powerful to release.
- djmips 6mo ago
  Good point but that was only 2019... :)
skybrian 6mo ago
It's long been conventional wisdom that you shouldn't write your own crypto libraries - leave that to experts. But excellent open source libraries are available, which do get reviewed by experts. And if you're willing to study, maybe you can learn enough about cryptography to become one of the experts? I'm wondering what other security-sensitive software that might become true of in the era of Mythos-or-better AI's? There will still be open source projects that anyone could learn enough to contribute to, but maybe starting from scratch and writing your own becomes less feasible if you aren't attracting enough attention to get attention from people with access to the best AI's? For example, Linux patches are going to get expert reviews, but maybe your homegrown OS won't?
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  Someone must have written the existing crypto libraries, so obviously they have not followed the conventional wisdom. The advice that you should not write crypto libraries must be taken very seriously, but you must understand that its meaning is just that this is one of those things that is harder than it seems, so you must not try to do it before being thoroughly prepared for this, because there are no shortcuts, and there are a lot of otherwise good professionals in programming who have made fools of themselves by implementing amateurish cryptographic solutions that demonstrated ignorance about how such things must be done. It is pretty much impossible for anyone to understand well enough all that you need for writing correctly a crypto library after a few days or weeks of study, but after a few years of studies and exposure to all relevant cryptographic literature, any competent programmer could become able to write a good cryptographic library. An intensive cryptography course of a few months would have been sufficient, except that I have never seen any single teacher that I could consider good enough to teach everything. Many things that I consider very important I had to gather from multiple sources, after thinking very carefully about which of them were right and which of them were wrong. Fortunately, today there are many more easily available sources for learning cryptography than a few decades ago. Like in other domains, now what has become difficult is not finding information, but distinguishing the correct and useful information from that which is either false or useless. Similarly for writing an operating system. For now, there is no evidence that Mythos has any special skills for discovering cryptography-specific weaknesses, like vulnerability to side-channels. All the bugs shown are the traditional bugs of careless programming, like out-of-bounds accesses or integer overflows.
tim-projects 6mo ago
Anthropic should provide a specific service where they attack a businesses infrastructure using this frontier model and then issue a report of all vulnerabilities found. I could imagine it would be quite lucrative. Much better than hiding it away where it can't help anyone.
- avaer 6mo ago
  Hypothetically... I'm joey joe bob who happens to be maintainer of a top 10 npm package. My wife got cancer so I need money FAST. Unrelated: can you mythos my lib? 1 month later: whoopsie my lib got hacked and the hackers stole a bunch of stuff. Sorry guys. It just wouldn't be good PR. And this is the best case scenario.
  - tim-projects 6mo ago
    Your scenario has little to do with what I said.
laurentiurad 6mo ago
My bet that this is just a model with a slimmer safety alignment which yields results in 100 agent running in parallel configuration.
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  They have said that their harness that is used for finding bugs is running many times Mythos for each source file, with increasingly specific prompts, depending on the previous results, and all the independent runs are done in parallel.
gxs 6mo ago
I had a similar thought, though not as extreme, the second they started nerfing and filtering models Their intensions were good, they always are, but the minute you decide to nerf something powerful for someone, it means someone out there has access to the full blown, unnerfed version Which means there are powerful people out there using AI in ways or for activities in which you will never be allowed to anyway So yeah, this is just more of the same
psychoslave 6mo ago
It's not clear to me if the author talk about European invasion as the colonization pattern behind pretended American frontier, as it was lands that never any human had reached before.
camillomiller 6mo ago
The richer are just getting scammed faster this time around
furyofantares 6mo ago
As a teenager, visual studio cost 650 dollars or so. More money than I had ever held by a wide margin.
AIorNot 6mo ago
For pete's sake stop with the thinkpeices already.. its only been an week and the model isnt even out yet!!!!! OMG this generation - we can't separete the outrage from reality anymore. Meanwhile 3000 people have died arbitrarily in Iran War -while we navel gaze.
- contraposit 6mo ago
  Human race is indeed fascinating. We kill millions of cows for food while doing the following in the same breath. A bronze sculpture unveiled in March 2026 in Almaty, Kazakhstan (near the Europe/Asia border region), honors strangers who formed a human chain to save a dog from the Sayran Reservoir in 2016. The statue, located along the canal embankment, symbolizes unity and collective action after the 2016 viral rescue.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
bcatanzaro 6mo ago
Some of these concerns are precisely why we are building Nemotron at NVIDIA. We want to make it possible for people to invent and deploy AI in all sorts of new and unforeseen ways. Nemotron is: 1. Not just open weight, but open data (to the limits of what is feasible), open recipe, open technique 2. In the future built by a coalition of organizations coming together to build great openly developed AI. Nemotron 3 Super is our most successful model yet. [1] Ultra is coming soon. And then Nemotron 4. We can afford to do this because when AI grows, NVIDIA's opportunity also grows. [1] https://kaitchup.substack.com/p/the-fastest-and-cheapest-120b-llm https://kaitchup.substack.com/p/the-fastest-and-cheapest-120...
- htrp 6mo ago
  how do you justify the compute investment for something like nemotron ? especially if all the labs are willing to pay for those same GPU clusters for inference or training runs?
  - bcatanzaro 6mo ago
    Nemotron has two reasons to exist, both of which are strategic to NVIDIA. 1. Help NVIDIA design future systems for AI by more deeply understanding what it takes to build AI. 2. Keep the AI ecosystem strong and diverse throughout the world by providing AI infrastructure that many companies can innovate on. This is not a science project, nor is it for the joy of giving something away. Both of these reasons are core to NVIDIA.
    - htrp 6mo ago
      Does Nvidia maintain it's own compute hardware expressly for model training? Otherwise, I'm not sure how you keep up with the SOTA model techniques.
      - bcatanzaro 6mo ago
        Yes
- 6mo ago
markhahn 6mo ago
mythos has not been demonstrated doing anything dramatically different than other models. so as other comments say: very premature. but the basic premise (shared among a lot of ai-doomers and ai-shamers), is that the bigs have somehow raped society (by training on everything available). this needs to be challenged: it implies quite a strong model of IP ownership, which is not what appears in law, or in founding documents (which are quite different from current law).
- achierius 6mo ago
  While I don't agree with your conclusion, I like the phrase -- "raped society" does quite well capture the feeling of violation I think many feel at having their own publications turned into machines meant to impoverish them.
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  "Raping society" seems an appropriate term, though a better metaphor is cutting a public forest or mining in public lands, which are other examples of converting public properties into private properties. Actually I, and apparently many others, would have no problem with the fact that companies like OpenAI or Google have gathered huge amounts of information from all over the world into their training sets. What bothers me is that I do not have access to the same information. If I would try to run a bot, it would be blocked immediately by all sites. If I would copy pirated books or movies, that is supposed to be punishable legally. None of what is forbidden for me was forbidden for the big companies. What I want is not that they should be punished, but I want for myself and for any other people the same rights, i.e. access to the same training sets. For now, I must be grateful that a part of the hoarded information is available for the public in a non-deterministic manner in the existing open-weights models. This is much better than nothing, but I would prefer access to the training sets, even if in that case the AI companies would keep for themselves any trained models. There are many tricks that they have used during training, but by far the input training data is much more important, since anyone can discover better training algorithms. What I find unacceptable is that now they consider as their private property what they have mined from public lands.
  - 6mo ago
digitaltrees 6mo ago
Phenomenal analysis. I am actually going to start working on solutions for this. I am not willing to risk my kids becoming serfs because of misguided leadership at the foundational labs.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
I bought a used 16 GB Intel A770 GPU for $200, and it's capable of running pretty powerful open stable diffusion and large language models. Sure, I could get more performance out of proprietary models on much more expensive hardware, but there's diminishing returns, and consumer hardware and open models keep getting better. I don't think the big investments into hosting models will pay off, especially as the base-line capabilities of integrate GPUs become enough to run a good model at home.
- chr15m 6mo ago
  What kind of context size and speeds are you getting?
  - dlcarrier 6mo ago
    I only have it set up for SDXL right now, and it's getting 1.27s/it at 1024x1024, and I can render images at up to 5 megapixels.

189 points by MindGods 6mo ago

if it is an actual leap, expect more 90% is good enough open weights to hit the next 6 months. Theres no reason competitors will hold underperforming models if they have to retool. might as well do more marketing.

randallsquared 6mo ago

> But it is another thing entirely to share access only with enterprise partners such as Crowdstrike, Cisco, and Microsoft, which are known to have massive security incidents regularly. The stated purpose of Glasswing is to give infra and security orgs the chance to close holes and improve their security. In that context, it seems odd to call for not providing them access with the justification being that they have security breaches sometimes. Mythos may or may not itself be opened to the public at some point, but I would charitably expect that Anthropic plans that a future model at least as good as Mythos Preview will be, and the limited release for Mythos is intended to make that eventuality safer by having most of the existing holes patched.

somnic 6mo ago
I can understand the frustration with giving away this tool to companies with poorer security practices than their importance warrants, same as frustrations with bailouts. It means they don't really face the full consequences of underinvestment in security. Not to say it's a bad idea, but it does feel unjust.

keybored 6mo ago

> The Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly available vs those reserved for the already wealthy and pre-established. The Internet was developed by the US state sector and handed off to the private sector in the 90’s. Then it worked as an open space until it didn’t any more. Predictably driven by corporate interests. > In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that much that is distinctive about America was shaped by the existence of free land to the West where anyone could start over, and that this condition infused America with its characteristic liberty, egalitarianism, rejection of feudalistic hierarchy, self-sufficiency, and ambition. A more asinine comparison could not have been picked.

pizzly 6mo ago

Maybe not. You stated "Every country will pursue it as far as it can, and given the multipolar world we are back in, and our recent record with treaties and commitments, I do not believe there will be global alignment on risk reduction" and that is true. While Anthropic may hold of releasing Mythos I don't think they will for long. As long as there is someone somewhere in the world that releases a competing model then Anthropic will be forced to release Mythos. This also assumes that its not a marketing tactic from Anthropic in the first place, build suspense before releasing it. I would like to see more countries capable of producing frontier models. At the moment we have two in the world but many countries are building their own national models and AI infrastructure and may join the race. Having a multipolar world may actually result in more freedom in gaining access to frontier models.

cortesoft 6mo ago

This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me. Give it a few months and it will be just another model they are selling, but the NEWER model is just too powerful for the public.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
[flagged]
- Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
  Back in 2019, OpenAI delayed the release of GPT-2, stating "fake news generation and potential misuse". I guess we have those in buckets now?
jabedude 6mo ago
This happened before with GPT-2 being touted as "too dangerous to release"[0] at the time by OpenAI. I don't think that means every model will be safe to release in the future, but nothing I've read about Mythos seems like it's going to be different this time. [0]: https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  It's going to be a slightly better Opus. Every model released by any provider since 4o has been a modest improvement but over-hyped. Opus 4.6 included. I believe they are starting to split hairs and the primary lever left is adding compute.
  - enejej 6mo ago
    Yeah the only thing that will be left is to scale up compute and pray it creates escape velocity. Which frankly has been Sam’s whole thesis in raising money.
6mo ago

OldGreenYodaGPT 6mo ago

The problem is Anthropic doesn't have the compute to deploy this model to scale to everyone yet. Dario didn't believe that they needed as much compute, OpenAI is going to have much more compute unlocked this year and especially next year.

avaer 6mo ago
This is the real reason it's not out. Great to see they were able to spin their lack of resources and money losing business model into an abundance of benevolence and concern for the proletariat.
DrProtic 6mo ago
Let’s say the model is indeed groundbreaking but needs much more compute that they have, I wonder would merging Anthropic and OpenAI be on the table.
- contraposit 6mo ago
  On the efficiency side, why do we need 10 companies doing the same thing. "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle would agree with your proposal.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    Hello. We have detected your account has breached our terms of service. Your account has been banned. There is no recourse for this actions. As we all well know this message is great when there one or two private providers that can kick you from an entire market with no way of challenging them.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  It depends. If Mythos is AGI then OpenAI's charter says they have to merge with the winner.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago

wyc 6mo ago

> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is now truer than it ever was.

Ancalagon 6mo ago
The point is it won’t be if these new models stay locked to the public.
- bredren 6mo ago
  We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. I take a contra view and instead see this as fuel on the fire for tinkering to squeeze advanced functionality out of more available things. It has always been like this, the amateur improvising tooling and equipment to outdo companies with comparably infinite resources.
  - enraged_camel 6mo ago
    >> We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. This is false. Yesterday's article did not actually show this, and there are many comments in the discussion from actual security people (like tptacek) pointing that out.
    - bredren 6mo ago
      From what I can tell, this was not clearly settled. Your example author, actually corrected themselves saying LLMs “possibly” could perform successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696
      - 6mo ago

derektank 6mo ago

Most important point in the piece (though I’m not sure if the historical analogy to the grid holds, given local electricity production has been unavailable for the majority of the history of the grid) > You can generate your own electricity with a solar panel (think local models), but most people would rather pay a utility bill. And the power company doesn’t decide, on the basis of pedigree, who is worthy of electricity. Intelligence should work similarly, where the capabilities you can access scale may scale with vetting and due process, but the presumption should be access. Add safety guardrails to restrict dangerous use; start by making them overly trigger-happy if you must, and calibrate over time. But the default should be to allow entry.

chr15m 6mo ago
> most people would rather pay a utility bill What? All evidence points in the opposite direction.

hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago

I admit I didn't read the entire post (I honestly think authors really need to come to terms with the fact that we now live in a world of information excess, and pithiness is more important than ever), but I wouldn't feel too bad yet given there was a recent front page HN post about how free, open models could actually catch all the issues Mythos did, it just required a little more orchestration. E.g. see https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jag... for a detailed analysis.

airza 6mo ago
if an 1800 word post is just too long I think you are cooked. This is the nicest thing I can say on the subject.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
  It's not that 1800 words is too long, it's that I've seen probably 40-50 (at least) posts, analyses, and bloviations about Mythos since it came out. If the author doesn't very quickly get to why I should read their particular 1800 words over the other similar and competing tens of thousands of words on the subject, they are "cooked".
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    Open gemini chrome sidebar, type "sum." Watch the magic happen.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - notpachet 6mo ago
    They could just be writing for themselves, or their friends, or for people with the patience to read. You are making assumptions about how badly they want to reach your particular eyeballs. They might not care about trying to win over people with a minimal attention span as much as you think they do. What makes you think your comment was worth reading?

lowbloodsugar 6mo ago

In other, underreported news, companies like AirBnB are using open source models. Anthropic and OpenAI have a six months to year advantage over Qwen and other models. We reached the point a while ago where Anthropic models where good enough, and so now, inevitably, we’ve reached the point where open models are good enough. The boasting of models so good they can’t be shared was propaganda to frame the conversation. But for anyone paying attention, what matters is that open models are now good enough.

slopinthebag 6mo ago
Underrated comment. I think the future is actually quite bright, if we can continue to use open models, even if they are behind closed SOTA models they are still capable and will continue to improve.

simianwords 6mo ago

While I don't think Mythos is so powerful that it justifies containment permanently - I wonder how it might work when there is such an AI that can justify containment. What if this new model can start proving Millenial problems and provide insights in other fields that was not possible before? My intuition says that a model that is as good will also be equally well aligned -- but it is still highly risky to give it to the general public because all you need is one jailbreak from bad actors. At that point I think society would change so dramatically that "access to general public" would be a non issue. Rather, time would be spent on making abundance happen - you might think of the political struggles, economics and new ventures. Its a bit sad that democratised access is not provided because of negative sum possibilities like cybersecurity.

zkmon 6mo ago

You never needed a godzilla or a megatron to get on with your life. But the sellers of those monsters would make every attempt, in connivance with the authorities, to make it a basic necessity to use their services. That's a survival strategy for the monsters. The owners can't keep the monsters in cages for too long, even if the owner is a state actor.

fwipsy 6mo ago

The opportunity from the early days of the American frontier is not typical. Instead, it's the brief burst of unrestrained growth as a better-adapted organization (the US, software companies) expands into, and expands, a niche--cannibalizing the previous occupant (Native Americans, older stagnant companies.) At times growth is so rapid that individuals are able to advance the frontier, but if the field stagnates, individuals will be outcompeted by corporations. So, opportunity for individuals comes from disruption. Creative destruction is good up to a point, but it results from advancing capabilities. Technological advances compound and accelerate exponentially. Eventually we reach the point where any malcontent can destroy the world by snapping their fingers. At some point we need to place restrictions on the capabilities accessible to individuals. We have reached that point with nuclear weapons, and I think it is sensible to believe that AI is reaching that point as well.

brunoborges 6mo ago
> Yes, but today a 16-year-old building a unicorn is about as likely as winning the lottery. In today's world, a new digital service is more likely to be successful when attached to celebrities than from pure PLG / Marketing.
- fwipsy 6mo ago
  Sorry, I removed that line from the comment because I realized it wasn't really in line with the rest of the point I was making.
taurath 6mo ago
Frontier mythology also hides quite a lot of tragedy and deaths too because of how many native Americans needed to die for it to be a frontier. It was not by any means unsettled land.

shevy-java 6mo ago

> Even though the American dream is nearly dead That dream was always a lie. But in the past, people could purchase more in parity. You only need to look at income versus housing cost in, say, Canada. Realistically there should not exist any superrich, but this seems hard to change. That means there needs to be a different society be given as promise. Other countries manage that. In the USA they have the orange oligarch who said a while ago how there is no money for health care because he has to invade countries and wage war. So much for the "no more wars" promise.

suzzer99 6mo ago
The American dream was not a lie if you come from a country with no economic opportunity, or where the govt can just steal your successful business at any time. It's still not dead in that regard, although it's seen better days.

oa335 6mo ago

I don’t understand this sentiment at all - the older models are still available and still highly capable.

hgoel 6mo ago

I interpreted their "too dangerous to release" comment as a statement about the current situation. If the model is truly as capable as they say, and the security issues so numerous, it makes sense to hold out until the biggest targets have been patched. It'd only take one company deciding to not worry about safety, to change the calculus back to "we have to release this to stay competitive".

rdedev 6mo ago

> already happening with recursive self improvement Are any AI labs claiming this?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

operatingthetan 6mo ago

I doubt that Mythos is just so wonderful and not able to be replicated that we are actually being 'closed off' from frontier models. For example, the people who Anthropic "trusts" with this "dangerous" model are a handful of fortune 500 companies? Seriously? Those are the people we trust? We are going to have access to this within 6 months, and if we don't, someone else will offer an equivalent. Anthropic hasn't walked to the edge of the abyss only to be like "let the CEO's handle this!" It is simply not the edge of the abyss.

atleastoptimal 6mo ago

I think we are going to look at the era between 2019-2025 as a very rare blip in the history of public AI access. Regardless of whether fears about Mythos end up being justified, the clear trend is 1. AI models are becoming better and better at causing massively disruptive effects, leaving up larger and larger liabilities, especially as laws and regulations are being passed/proposed which would put the responsibility of some mass disruption/hacking event on the company which serves the model that made it possible 2. The relative advantage of serving an AI model for inference in exchange for money is waning compared to the advantage of using that model internally for purposes which accrue money/power/leverage for that AI company. Why serve a model at 30 dollars/million tokens when you've discovered you can use that model to run a simulated Quant firm with a net profit of 300 dollars/million tokens? Why offer the model to companies so they can find zero-day exploits, when you can find them yourself and sell the discovery to companies which would may millions to avoid this exploit being taken advantage of? 3. Why serve models so another wrapper company like Cursor can make billions off your tokens, and then try to train their own models as fast as possible, trained on your outputs so they aren't dependent on you? The entire AI startup industry and like 90% of YC batches depend on being able to serve frontier models at a profit, mediated through some wrapper, why can't OpenAI/ANthropic, once their models are good enough to handle the ideation/organizational problem, become their own incubator for thousands of AI run startups, running on models way better than the public has access to? As a consequence, there is less and less incentive over time to offer models as an API to the public.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
> AI models are becoming better and better at causing massively disruptive effects Anthropic chose to use their model to find a bunch of vulnerabilities. People have used much smaller models since to find the same issues. We are being set up to have certain pre-concieved notions about this model. Ripping away AI access from the public at this point would be catastrophic for the world economy. It's just not happening.

willworktill4pm 6mo ago

I'm old enough to remember claims that gpt-2 is too powerful to release.

djmips 6mo ago
Good point but that was only 2019... :)

skybrian 6mo ago

It's long been conventional wisdom that you shouldn't write your own crypto libraries - leave that to experts. But excellent open source libraries are available, which do get reviewed by experts. And if you're willing to study, maybe you can learn enough about cryptography to become one of the experts? I'm wondering what other security-sensitive software that might become true of in the era of Mythos-or-better AI's? There will still be open source projects that anyone could learn enough to contribute to, but maybe starting from scratch and writing your own becomes less feasible if you aren't attracting enough attention to get attention from people with access to the best AI's? For example, Linux patches are going to get expert reviews, but maybe your homegrown OS won't?

adrian_b 6mo ago
Someone must have written the existing crypto libraries, so obviously they have not followed the conventional wisdom. The advice that you should not write crypto libraries must be taken very seriously, but you must understand that its meaning is just that this is one of those things that is harder than it seems, so you must not try to do it before being thoroughly prepared for this, because there are no shortcuts, and there are a lot of otherwise good professionals in programming who have made fools of themselves by implementing amateurish cryptographic solutions that demonstrated ignorance about how such things must be done. It is pretty much impossible for anyone to understand well enough all that you need for writing correctly a crypto library after a few days or weeks of study, but after a few years of studies and exposure to all relevant cryptographic literature, any competent programmer could become able to write a good cryptographic library. An intensive cryptography course of a few months would have been sufficient, except that I have never seen any single teacher that I could consider good enough to teach everything. Many things that I consider very important I had to gather from multiple sources, after thinking very carefully about which of them were right and which of them were wrong. Fortunately, today there are many more easily available sources for learning cryptography than a few decades ago. Like in other domains, now what has become difficult is not finding information, but distinguishing the correct and useful information from that which is either false or useless. Similarly for writing an operating system. For now, there is no evidence that Mythos has any special skills for discovering cryptography-specific weaknesses, like vulnerability to side-channels. All the bugs shown are the traditional bugs of careless programming, like out-of-bounds accesses or integer overflows.

tim-projects 6mo ago

Anthropic should provide a specific service where they attack a businesses infrastructure using this frontier model and then issue a report of all vulnerabilities found. I could imagine it would be quite lucrative. Much better than hiding it away where it can't help anyone.

avaer 6mo ago
Hypothetically... I'm joey joe bob who happens to be maintainer of a top 10 npm package. My wife got cancer so I need money FAST. Unrelated: can you mythos my lib? 1 month later: whoopsie my lib got hacked and the hackers stole a bunch of stuff. Sorry guys. It just wouldn't be good PR. And this is the best case scenario.
- tim-projects 6mo ago
  Your scenario has little to do with what I said.

laurentiurad 6mo ago

My bet that this is just a model with a slimmer safety alignment which yields results in 100 agent running in parallel configuration.

adrian_b 6mo ago
They have said that their harness that is used for finding bugs is running many times Mythos for each source file, with increasingly specific prompts, depending on the previous results, and all the independent runs are done in parallel.

gxs 6mo ago

I had a similar thought, though not as extreme, the second they started nerfing and filtering models Their intensions were good, they always are, but the minute you decide to nerf something powerful for someone, it means someone out there has access to the full blown, unnerfed version Which means there are powerful people out there using AI in ways or for activities in which you will never be allowed to anyway So yeah, this is just more of the same

psychoslave 6mo ago

It's not clear to me if the author talk about European invasion as the colonization pattern behind pretended American frontier, as it was lands that never any human had reached before.

camillomiller 6mo ago

The richer are just getting scammed faster this time around

furyofantares 6mo ago

As a teenager, visual studio cost 650 dollars or so. More money than I had ever held by a wide margin.

AIorNot 6mo ago

For pete's sake stop with the thinkpeices already.. its only been an week and the model isnt even out yet!!!!! OMG this generation - we can't separete the outrage from reality anymore. Meanwhile 3000 people have died arbitrarily in Iran War -while we navel gaze.

contraposit 6mo ago
Human race is indeed fascinating. We kill millions of cows for food while doing the following in the same breath. A bronze sculpture unveiled in March 2026 in Almaty, Kazakhstan (near the Europe/Asia border region), honors strangers who formed a human chain to save a dog from the Sayran Reservoir in 2016. The statue, located along the canal embankment, symbolizes unity and collective action after the 2016 viral rescue.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

bcatanzaro 6mo ago

Some of these concerns are precisely why we are building Nemotron at NVIDIA. We want to make it possible for people to invent and deploy AI in all sorts of new and unforeseen ways. Nemotron is: 1. Not just open weight, but open data (to the limits of what is feasible), open recipe, open technique 2. In the future built by a coalition of organizations coming together to build great openly developed AI. Nemotron 3 Super is our most successful model yet. [1] Ultra is coming soon. And then Nemotron 4. We can afford to do this because when AI grows, NVIDIA's opportunity also grows. [1] https://kaitchup.substack.com/p/the-fastest-and-cheapest-120b-llm https://kaitchup.substack.com/p/the-fastest-and-cheapest-120...

htrp 6mo ago
how do you justify the compute investment for something like nemotron ? especially if all the labs are willing to pay for those same GPU clusters for inference or training runs?
- bcatanzaro 6mo ago
  Nemotron has two reasons to exist, both of which are strategic to NVIDIA. 1. Help NVIDIA design future systems for AI by more deeply understanding what it takes to build AI. 2. Keep the AI ecosystem strong and diverse throughout the world by providing AI infrastructure that many companies can innovate on. This is not a science project, nor is it for the joy of giving something away. Both of these reasons are core to NVIDIA.
  - htrp 6mo ago
    Does Nvidia maintain it's own compute hardware expressly for model training? Otherwise, I'm not sure how you keep up with the SOTA model techniques.
    - bcatanzaro 6mo ago
      Yes
6mo ago

markhahn 6mo ago

mythos has not been demonstrated doing anything dramatically different than other models. so as other comments say: very premature. but the basic premise (shared among a lot of ai-doomers and ai-shamers), is that the bigs have somehow raped society (by training on everything available). this needs to be challenged: it implies quite a strong model of IP ownership, which is not what appears in law, or in founding documents (which are quite different from current law).

achierius 6mo ago
While I don't agree with your conclusion, I like the phrase -- "raped society" does quite well capture the feeling of violation I think many feel at having their own publications turned into machines meant to impoverish them.
adrian_b 6mo ago
"Raping society" seems an appropriate term, though a better metaphor is cutting a public forest or mining in public lands, which are other examples of converting public properties into private properties. Actually I, and apparently many others, would have no problem with the fact that companies like OpenAI or Google have gathered huge amounts of information from all over the world into their training sets. What bothers me is that I do not have access to the same information. If I would try to run a bot, it would be blocked immediately by all sites. If I would copy pirated books or movies, that is supposed to be punishable legally. None of what is forbidden for me was forbidden for the big companies. What I want is not that they should be punished, but I want for myself and for any other people the same rights, i.e. access to the same training sets. For now, I must be grateful that a part of the hoarded information is available for the public in a non-deterministic manner in the existing open-weights models. This is much better than nothing, but I would prefer access to the training sets, even if in that case the AI companies would keep for themselves any trained models. There are many tricks that they have used during training, but by far the input training data is much more important, since anyone can discover better training algorithms. What I find unacceptable is that now they consider as their private property what they have mined from public lands.
- 6mo ago

digitaltrees 6mo ago

Phenomenal analysis. I am actually going to start working on solutions for this. I am not willing to risk my kids becoming serfs because of misguided leadership at the foundational labs.

dlcarrier 6mo ago

I bought a used 16 GB Intel A770 GPU for $200, and it's capable of running pretty powerful open stable diffusion and large language models. Sure, I could get more performance out of proprietary models on much more expensive hardware, but there's diminishing returns, and consumer hardware and open models keep getting better. I don't think the big investments into hosting models will pay off, especially as the base-line capabilities of integrate GPUs become enough to run a good model at home.

chr15m 6mo ago
What kind of context size and speeds are you getting?
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  I only have it set up for SDXL right now, and it's getting 1.27s/it at 1024x1024, and I can render images at up to 5 megapixels.