15 ms·
Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200
https://xcancel.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375 https://xcancel.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
- stevefan1999 5mo agoAren't Anthropic afraid of Elon siphoning the model weights out from the network buses?
- aurareturn 5mo agoPretty sure models are encrypted all the way.
- ACCount37 5mo agoCan't run inference on encrypted weights and get any kind of performance out of it.
- aurareturn 5mo agoThe whole system has encryption all the way through. Otherwise, OpenAI/Anthropic would never use external clouds since the weights are some of the most valuable assets in the world.
- ACCount37 5mo agoMatmuls need access to decrypted weights to do their work. Which means that getting the full weights out isn't even an "if" - it's "how much effort". The encryption wouldn't do much more than a gentleman's agreement would. The only real move for Anthropic there is to outline contract penalties for letting weights get leaked, and never give less trusted external inference providers access to cutting edge system weights. Exposure is limited either way. Opus 4.7 weights are a deprecating asset - it's bleeding edge today, very valuable now, but it'll lose a lot of its value the moment Opus 5.0 drops.
- aurareturn 5mo agoThat would require hacking Nvidia's GPUs/racks to extract the weights. The weights are encrypted, sent to the GPU/rack encrypted. When it does inference, it will use decrypted weights but there is no way to get those weights unless you find a way to exploit Nvidia's GPU security. Do you think OpenAI would send CoreWeave their GPT 5.5 Pro weights if an admin employee at CoreWeave can access the full weights unencrypted? Of course not.
- ACCount37 5mo agoIt would require exactly that. A bit more involved than "scp that big file", yes. But you make a mistake by treating it as a hard blocker. Like I said: it's a gentleman's agreement. If Musk said "I want Opus 4.7 weights", and those weights were on Colossus 1 hardware, he'd have those weights on his desktop, unencrypted, within a couple of weeks. There's also the side channel line, because having inference on your hardware typically allows you to do things like snoop into KV cache and peek at per-layer, or even per-expert, residuals. Which allows for some very advanced distillation attacks. Might be easier/more deniable to pull that off than dumping full weights, in some circumstances.
- aurareturn 5mo agoMaybe Elon will use Mythos to hack the encryption and steal Mythos’ weights. =)
- flumes_whims_ 5mo agoThe overhead shrinks with larger models. It doesn't seem that bad. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03992v2 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03992v2
- davedx 5mo agoDude, Chinese labs distil attack via the APIs, if Musk wanted to do something like that, technically he could. Legally it would be a giant slam dunk liability though
- aurareturn 5mo agoDistilling is different from "siphoning the model weights". I would think that Anthropic has a system for this. After all, they deploy to different clouds already. Their weights are worth billions, I presume that they take security very seriously and have done a lot of homework to trust no one.
- stevefan1999 5mo agoWell, knowledge distillation requires a teacher model and a student model and the student model attempts to learn and extract and (preferrably) compress the information of the teacher model, so it is possible for model collapse due to high SNR in between [1]. What I suggested is to steal the (possibly intermediate) weight in between by sniffing the network communication bus, which means MITM for getting the exact values. Or unless it turns out OpenAI or Anthropic leveraged homomorphic encryption, or I'm not certain how is Anthropic would safely allow Mythos to run on AWS without their control. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_distillation
- wongarsu 5mo agoIs xAI a competitor worth worrying about? They make good models, at times SotA (at least if you don't need coding, their last good coding model was six months ago), with lower safeguards than either Anthropic or OpenAI, and they still fail to capture meaningful market share or mind share. The name Grok is tainted by the twitter bot of the same name operated by xAI/X. Being owned by Musk lets the company appear unstable and untrustworthy in the minds of many. Their marketing game is just bad all around. They struggle to retain top talent. Maybe their next model will be great. I doubt it will matter. I doubt xAI siphoning off Anthropic models and distilling that would matter. Model performance is not the main factor dragging down xAI
- sometimelurker 5mo ago> Is xAI a competitor worth worrying about? they have GPUs so yes
- nroets 5mo agoTheft of trade secrets. And so many people will have to be involved that evidence of the crime is bound to leak out.
- lavezzi 5mo agoConcern maybe elsewhere, but I like how we have gone full circle. SpaceX expects to complete its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor roughly 30 days after it begins trading publicly, according to Bloomberg. Cursor's Composer 2 model was built on Kimi K2.5, who were in turn accused of 'distillation' attacks by Anthropic. Anthropic now relies on SpaceX for compute demands.
- aurareturn 5mo agoMore signs that xAI might be giving up on the AGI race. xAI let Cursor train a model on Colossus 2, gave the entire Colossus1 to Anthropic, and is now giving compute in Colossus2 to Anthropic as well.
- paxys 5mo agoIt was kinda obvious when SpaceX "acquired" it. Elon rewarded xAI investors/prevented lawsuits by giving them SpaceX equity, and that was that.
- papascrubs 5mo agoElon lost his lawsuit with openAI and knows xAI isn't on the same trajectory. Might as well try to win the bet and flip off Sam by supporting the best competition. Also they are getting a head start on AI as a commodity. I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made for those that can leverage their capital to essentially rent capacity right now. If he's not making enough off of grok, might as well cover their expenses.
- tristanj 5mo agoBad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their models.
- kibibu 5mo agoGrok is also tuned to align with Musk's personal beliefs. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoOpposed to all other models being the bastion of objectivity? Must be truly vindicating to have to hear other peoles opinions after decades in the silicon valley bubble.
- fasbg1 5mo agoI though Claude is too woke. Musk has posted that at least 50 times in the last year. But booking outrageous rental fees as fake AI revenue ahead of the SpaceX IPO apparently takes precedence.
- tmp10423288442 5mo agoThe eternal truth: money talks, bullshit walks
- thelastgallon 5mo agoMusk will buy Anthropic and fix the wokeness. It was done before.
- 0xy 5mo agoAnthropic is paying real cash, how is it fake revenue?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- amazingamazing 5mo agoI don't see a scenario where it really makes sense to be a frontier lab long term. Eventually model quality will plateau then you distill and get 90% for 10% or less cost.
- twoodfin 5mo agoOver the past 6 months, Anthropic has made more waves as a product company than a frontier lab.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoCant wait to see their books once they IPO
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoGeneral AI is that scenario. The investor dream is that their horse hits general AI first, patents it (or otherwise somehow stops the competition from hitting it), and then reaps the massive benefits. I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.
- usef- 5mo agoThis might come down to when you expect plateau to happen. You could have said similar about transistor density many decades ago. (I'm not denying it could happen next year for all we know. But we simply don't know, and from what I hear from researchers the breadth of ideas we've tried are still small)
- baq 5mo agoOpus and GPT are so different there’s room for both and I wouldn’t be ignoring Gemini even if it isn’t ahem great at coding, since it’s quite obviously very good otherwise. In the times before you also would rather have very smart people working together instead of one very smart dude alone even if he had an identical twin.
- 5mo ago
- alienreborn 5mo agoWhy is xAI giving up their advantage? Is this a signal that their frontier model improvements are plateauing and decided there is no value in hoarding all their compute?
- tw04 5mo agoWhat advantage? Has there ever been any indication they’re leading in any segment? Sure Elon has thrown a bunch of money at hardware, but to what end? And frankly as bad as Altman is from a: if AI is really going to disrupt humanity do I want this guy in charge? Elon is 10x worse. So why would the best and the brightest ever work for him?
- eightysixfour 5mo agoIn a compute starved world, big ass data centers are an advantage.
- loktarogar 5mo agoyes, but it's only advantage if one is compute-strained and the other isn't. if they both have lots then there's no advantage. if one doesn't fully utilise their compute then it's not an advantage either
- eightysixfour 5mo agoWell, it appears all their competitors are compute starved so…
- loktarogar 5mo agoI mean. they're selling it to a competitor so it's not really an advantage
- 8note 5mo agocan you elucidate what that advantage is, that isnt renting it out for the highest price to somebody that really needs it?
- gaze 5mo agoI think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size. Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/ https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
- georgemcbay 5mo agoYup, and now Anthropic is complicit in the environmental damage and health problems for local residents that these data centers are causing. But hey, number must go up, right?
- idle_zealot 5mo agoHave you considered that the march of progress requires human blood to grease the gears and mulched skulls to pave the (highly efficient) road? Really, when you take into account all of the future lives this will improve and save it's difficult to claim any cost now is too high. Would you stand in their way and delay the day that Mythos cures cancer? This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.
- Johnny_Bonk 5mo agoI loled
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoI'm not saying human blood and mulched skulls are a renewable source of power, I'm just saying. Or maybe they can partner with SoulCycle to power computation with 24/7 spin classes?
- kennywinker 5mo agoAnd people called the matrix’s human batteries far-fetched.
- urams 5mo agoVery possible Elon is doing this to make give Anthropic better chances against OAI while he attempts to reshape xAI. Also possible he sees infra as the future of xAI if he really believes in the value of space compute. Hard to see this any of this as anything other than a bearish sign for Grok though.
- jameson 5mo agoRight, also Anthropic has been having difficult time getting more GPUs
- fillskills 5mo agoWe could see the first company vertically integrated from etching to chip to data center
- jacobrast 5mo agoWhat do you mean by etching? Google does also it's own chip design with TPUs, data centers, and models but afaik only TSMC Intel and Samsung do the actual semiconductor fabrication
- ericd 5mo agoAssume he's referring to SpaceX's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab
- oblio 5mo ago> Analysts estimate the costs for the full-scale facility at between US$5−13 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia Musk and MBS should hold hands.
- gpm 5mo agoTurning The Line into one giant ~~paperclip~~ chip assembly line! We can call it the Peta(Principle)Line!
- jgalt212 5mo agoToo bad Enron is still not around. They'd have some real fun with today's electrical markets.
- throwatdem12311 5mo agoCool. Can they make Claude not absolute dogwater then?
- brightball 5mo agohttps://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375?s=20 https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375?s=20
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoHere's a probably stupid question - if someone were unbounded by ethics and conceivably had enough power and connections to power to shield themselves from many consequences of their actions - and that person owned these DCs, could they in theory observe all the streams of tokens coming in and out of these models, and even exfiltrate copies of these models wholesale to have their own teams do what they will with them in the pursuit of building their own competitive models? Or is there something fundamental in the way these models get deployed (encryption or something or than legal contracts?) at this scale that prohibits the owners of the infra from gaining this level of insight / access?
- fragmede 5mo agoThere's accusations that the Chinese labs have done essentially that to OpenAI and Anthropic and exfiltrated their models without having DC access, so if you had DC access, yes, you could do that. If you had DC access though you could just copy the model onto an SSD.
- zozbot234 5mo agoThe Chinese labs have been accused of training on elicited chat logs on a massive scale in violation of ToS. That's possibly a real concern, but it's nowhere close to "exfiltrating" the model or even roughly matching its behavior.
- tristanj 5mo ago1) The situation you described would be covered under the contract between Anthropic and xAI, and that any violation of that would be subject to financial penalties and legal proceedings. The US has a robust corporate legal system, and disputes do get resolved through the court system, although in a slow and costly manner. The contract can stipulate a penalty at a high enough amount to discourage this behavior. 2) Output from models & intra-datacenter communications can be encrypted if customers truly cared. 3) There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens... If we look at Deepseek V4-pro, created by Deepseek who Anthropic formally accused of harvesting Claude tokens at scale, it performs the same as Claude did 6 months prior.
- mrcwinn 5mo agoAnthropic is gross for this. The grandstanding about principles and values is intolerable.
- labrador 5mo agoMusk said Anthropic Claude was woke DEI until he said it wasn't. It must be hard for Musk fans to keep up.
- vessenes 5mo agoI mean … they’re mostly sitting on their SpaceX stock and rubbing their hands gleefully. What do they have to keep up with? Disclosure: former (small) SX investor.
- labrador 5mo agoYou just made my sub text the text. Money makes the world go around. Who cares about values when there's money to be made?
- varalaakshay 5mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRelated: SpaceX S-1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933
- nelox 5mo agoI predict SpaceX will subsume Anthropic at some point.
- momo26 5mo agoDoes an expansion of computing power on this scale imply that computing capital is displacing model architecture as the true moat in AI competition?
- zitterbewegung 5mo agoSeems like either Grok is being shut down or it will be "powered by anthropic" soon.
- brookst 5mo agoGrok’s whole thing is being irresponsible and edgy. Can’t s ee Anthropic going for that, can’t see Grok’s customer base accepting an AI that refuses to do nonconsensual porn.
- londons_explore 5mo agoModel fine-tunes to change the 'edgy' tone are very cheap and easy to do. Grok could easily be powered by Claude in just a few weeks engineering time.
- brookst 5mo agoTechnically yes, but my point was that I do not think Anthropic would be receptive to a pitch to fine tune Opus to be an edgelord.
- ramon156 5mo agoHow come a company like Anthropic has invested in photonic computing? If it's good enough for Boeing, I'd assume they would at least invest in it. qc-LPU100 seems worth it for some matrix mult, if it can be proven its O(n) (at least less than O(n^3).
- ChicagoDave 5mo agoSigh. I’d hoped Anthropic would steer clear of blatantly unethical practices but here they go in bed with that guy and his horribly damaging data center.
- oezi 5mo agoYes, quite a bad reputation hit for Anthropic to get in bed with Musk. Tesla lost half its marketshare in Europe because Elon is meddling in our democracy, is promoting right wing populist parties and supporting Trump in general.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoNo, they’ve lost market share because they haven’t released a new product in years. Meanwhile China is releasing hundreds of excellent models into the European market which are better than Tesla’s.
- oezi 5mo agoThat adds to it. But you are underestimating how much Europeans were/are shocked by Elon's Nazi salute and the DOGE fallout.
- ChicagoDave 5mo agoPretty sure Americans hate him too. You can see Tesla new car staging lots full and the cars never move. They try to hide the Cybertruck lots.
- burnerRhodov3 5mo agoAmerican's love Elon... Just saying. Fun fact, most of us love Trump too :)
- burnerRhodov3 5mo agoEurope has a hugely shrinking demographic, and is actively decoupling from the United States. There's almost no innovation and you are making the mistake of getting in bed with China and constantly suing our tech companies. Europe needs to focus more on Europe and less US politics.
- chinathrow 5mo agoI use Claude daily but I do not want that my spend is going towards Elon.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoMight want to check the Anthropic parking lot, this might have already been happening.
- jpadkins 5mo agoI see the programming was effective on you.
- zenai666 5mo ago[flagged]
- Lucasoato 5mo agoOk, maybe this question is a bit silly, but could it possibly be that Elon is doing this to steal Anthropic models secrets and using them to improve Grok?
- aurareturn 5mo agoNo. Model weights are encrypted. Elon is doing this because Anthropic is desperate for compute, SpaceX needs to juice up its balance sheet before IPO, and xAI model team isn't competitive.
- pona-a 5mo agoHomomorphic encryption doesn't exit at any meaningful scale. The weights must still be stored plain in the RAM for inference to work
- spacebanana7 5mo agoSpaceX's data centre business is much more valuable than Grok, so this wouldn't make sense.
- stefan_ 5mo agoValuable? If SpaceX is a majority "resell electricity" business, its valuation will be a tiny fraction of what they are trying to push.
- spacebanana7 5mo agoYou won’t see “resell electricity” on the IPO brochures. They’ll say something like multi billion dollar ARR hyperscaler business. To the extent both are true, it’s non trivial to have large grid connections in the US these days or even gas pipeline connections hooked up to generators around a datacenter. Those assets are valuable.
- alecco 5mo agoThe model weights, sure he can "steal" them. But do what then? Serve it on the side? Even distillation would be obvious. And I wouldn't be surprised Anthropic is running the smaller inference models, keeping the base large model in machines they fully control/own.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoWar makes strange bedfellows.
- try-working 5mo agoxAI cannot train models. Anthropic cannot do inference. The roles of these two companies have already been decided; one as a pure inference provider, the other as a pure model manufacturer.
- poelzi 5mo agoNobody uses grok except checking shit on X At least the hardware is not idle
- zombot 5mo agoWhen they are doing Colossus (The Forbin Project), I wonder who will be building Samaritan (Person of Interest)?
- zhangdake 5mo ago[dead]
- itrunsdoomguy 5mo agoThey should set up a Doom server there.
- 6thbit 5mo agoThis isn't pointing towards a merger is it? xAI gets the cashflow and makes spaceX bottom line more appealing. But that guy Musk hardly makes deals that favor other companies over his, so what am i missing?
- 7e 5mo agoxAI is bleeding tons of cash, and they don’t have the ability to use the compute for robotaxis, which have been a disaster. Grok monetization is also low.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- up2isomorphism 5mo agoWill this solve it making up numbers it never sees? Unlikely.