8 ms·

The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. Th

• olmo23 4mo ago
  > no nationality controls in place Not for now, but how long before we have KYC regulations concerning LLMs?
  • thefounder 4mo ago
    That’s really what Dario wants. Let’s hope he doesn’t get it
    • dofm 4mo ago
      Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain. But I also think they exist in a sort of un-designed corporate narcissism, which is a common trait in bubble economies — I am not judging them particularly severely. Netscape under Clark and Andreessen and Sun under McNealy both fell into corporate narcissism: the belief that only they really mattered, that they were chosen, and that the world needed to rearrange itself to just let them shine. They arguably let themselves get played by Oracle (a corporate psychopath) and others as a result. OpenAI's position is profoundly corporate-narcissistic: all we need is all the money in the economy and not to have to do anything upsetting like think about turning a profit for the next four years. Like rich kids. It would be nice if you believed we were so important that we should get an enormous stipend for just being us. Anthropic's position is: we think we're so unique and ominous that government needs to make us both essential and terrifying. We have to exist otherwise worse people will. Both narcissistic positions.
      • baq 4mo ago
        > Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain. it has to be, because the other way around - the government taking over parts or the whole thing - is inevitable if the trend holds.
        • dofm 4mo ago
          Porque no los dos?
          • baq 4mo ago
            this is exactly the play is my point
        • blitzar 4mo ago
          the inevitable trend is that numbers will be free and nobody will control the whole thing ai-celebrities are just clinging to relevance like all the other celebrities out there
          • intended 4mo ago
            HN is the builder side of the conversation, and in my experience, few safety people congregate here. The safety side of tech is a PTSD inducing shit show. Governments are more than happy to champion age verification laws, because parents, around the world, are clamoring for anything to pump the breaks on the social media experiment. Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.
            • dofm 4mo ago
              > Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat. I don't think anyone in tech is really truly engaging with how quickly the shine has come off the tech industry. Except maybe Apple, who even so still have some work to do.
    • baq 4mo ago
      what Dario wants is to retain any influence whatsover on how the research progresses before the inevitable nationalization of the frontier. he gets to keep the N-2 tech and maybe influence the N-1 tech, but the only influence on the frontier he has is today; whatever he imprints in the pipeline the government takes over. IOW I don't think he thinks in the same categories as most folks here.
      • stogot 4mo ago
        N-1? N-2?
        • Avicebron 4mo ago
          Best-possible-model (N) - Two Generations (2), same with N-1, N is the SOTA in this example. I'm not sure that actually clarifies what the comment is trying to say other than they think the models will be nationalized (can't even imagine what that would look like).
          • baq 4mo ago
            basically imagine the Manhattan project, but instead of blowing up the desert they're building the biggest datacenter you've ever seen.
            • Avicebron 4mo ago
              Isn't this the beginning of the plot of "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream"? The exceptionally disturbing dystopian horror?
              • baq 4mo ago
                the possible futures after the thing is built are uncountable, but hoping the thing won't get built at this point is naive. in general I agree people should be reading a lot more sci-fi nowadays than they used to.
    • vbezhenar 4mo ago
      But he already got it, no? Claude Fable can only be made available to US citizens, which implies that every user who wants to use Claude Fable must provide proof of citizenship in some way, basically KYC.
      • misnome 4mo ago
        For everyone, not just them
        • thefounder 4mo ago
          Exactly that’s what he wants and then there will be a loophole to close: open source models.
  • throw1234567891 4mo ago
    Yeah yeah, but after the IPO!
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• swalsh 4mo ago
  The distilled versions miss the spark of the model. Its like they land in the uncanny valley of models.
  • realusername 4mo ago
    They get to 80% of the top models for 10x cheaper, unless you don't care about the money at all, it's hard to ignore.
• embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. But is that last part actually true though? Sure, there might be 600B+ models available for download and local inference if you have the hardware, but does the users who use Anthropic switch over to those even if they're available even as hosted models? Seems like some do, most don't, Anthropic and Claude remains very popular among the people who use LLMs, there is no denying that.
  • ForHackernews 4mo ago
    > Anthropic and Claude remains very popular among the people who use LLMs Only because someone else is paying the bills. I use Claude Opus at work because my employer pays for the tokens and encourages me to do it. At home, I use DeepSeek Flash. It's not as good, but it's maybe 0.7 quality for 0.001 cost.
    • mark_l_watson 4mo ago
      I have a question that perhaps you or someone else here has an answer for: I enjoy using Opus via Google Antigravity (usually agy) for perhaps 90 minutes a week. For Google’s subsidized $20/month plan they seem to give out a reasonably generous amount of Claude tokens. How does this compare with Anthropic’s $20/month plan using Claude Code? BTW, I also use DeepSeek v4 Flash very frequently: fast and so cheap it is almost free.
      • trollbridge 4mo ago
        Anthropic's plans are based on user experience of usage, not raw token counts, so you get to run through so many conversation turns, etc. within a 5 hour usage window. (Cursor, OpenCode Go, and others are similar.) Cursor's $20 a month plan provides a reasonable amount of Opus tokens as well.
      • everforward 4mo ago
        It’s really hard to translate minutes to tokens, it depends on how you’re using it. The best answer would be to pull session stats from your harness and compare that against the limits. I think Anthropic publishes the limits of each plan. If you’re using a pretty stock harness and not doing crazy multi-agent stuff with it, you’re probably fine. My girlfriend built a whole (but simple) React app with it and only hit the limits of the $20 plan once. In fairness, she was trying to get it to clean up a bunch of 800ish line React files at once with a vague “make it look nice” prompt that she ran a few times. I think it was just churning for like half an hour straight before she burned all her credits. It’s probably enough if you’re not on a fully agentic development strategy, it’s plenty to have it write tests and do comments and stuff, just not enough to continually have it doing giant refactoring passes.
• zozbot234 4mo ago
  "Distillation" from APIs is not a thing, it cannot replicate a model's deep reasoning and behavior.
  • archon 4mo ago
    I'm uneducated on how distillation works at more than a basic level so forgive me if this is a stupid question. Isn't "distillation" of another provider's model exactly how these models got training date in the first place: Massive amounts of the written word + Prompt -> Answer. Why wouldn't distillation produce similar "reasoning" in the new model? It's just inputs and outputs.
    • zozbot234 4mo ago
      Among other things, because you simply can't get those "massive amounts" of text from a SOTA model at reasonable cost. And complex reasoning cannot possibly be trained in a pure one-shot fashion, real post-training takes massive resources. The whole story doesn't add up.
    • maxbond 4mo ago
      What you're describing is (pre-)training. Distillation requires richer labels, the probability distribution over tokens (it would be logits rather than probabilities but that's not important). From a chat transcript you can only understand the argmax/most likely token of that distribution (and only if the API allows you to set the temperature to 0). It's not impossible for an API to give you that but they won't if they don't want you distilling their models. The intuition is that distillation exploits not only the "right" answer but the relationship between answers (what's the second most right answer? the third? etc).
  • saberience 4mo ago
    This is totally inaccurate, the APIs provide the reasoning logs. You ABSOLUTELY can distill from APIs, in fact, that's the primary way distillation is done currently.
    • 4mo ago
• _the_inflator 4mo ago
  I disagree. It is not the model alone. It needs a system which capitalizes on it. And this is very complex. Hardware, software, architecture - it takes a lot to get it right. Try running the latest OS models on a normal Mac or PC. Claude Fable and Mythos are systems not just pure models. And of course marketing. Don't believe the hype. I think Claude is often times underwhelming. Security concerns are also a concern companies have a blond spot for. The really toughest pro security (Yes, pro! Totally different framing!) company I know is Google after all. What I can companies advise to do is, really having more than just bug bounties but a professional hacker team that does nothing else but attacking them the whole day and night 24/7. This needs to be coordinated with the government otherwise you might sound an alarm and will be SWATed for doing good. And I would pay them huge sums since the risk and fallout warrant such a treatment, not the standard wage. Hackers are the real deal, not AI. Proof: Hackers using AI.
  • nerdsniper 4mo ago
    > I disagree. It is not the model alone. It needs a system which capitalizes on it. And this is very complex. AFAICT … despite saying you “disagree”, you appear to be agreeing with the parent comment that the model is less important and compute (all that complex infra) and data (also complex infra) are more important.
  • christkv 4mo ago
    For now I suspect however that the gigantic models are not needed and you will be able to do pretty much what you need in a specific domain with 120b or lower. There is so much trash in the frontier models. I don't need all the world's slam poetry for my coding tasks for example.
    • ACCount37 4mo ago
      Wrong, mostly. Model capability is a function of model size. Raising the bar raises model performance in every domain. An "idiot savant" model that's overtrained for a specific domain would beat a generalist model of the same size. But scale the generalist up enough, and it'll trounce the specialist. Removing poetry data from a model training mix doesn't give you much - it might even cost you some performance - and "idiot savant" approach of overtraining for a domain has a hard ceiling. So far, it seems like there's some equivalent of "g factor" in LLMs - a broad "intelligence" value that performance across many diverse domains correlates with. And, as a rule, larger models have more of it.
• barrkel 4mo ago
  Do you think token completion endpoints are the final form for AI APIs?
• slowmovintarget 4mo ago
  That thesis is not about what Anthropic will achieve, but about what power they think they ought to have. That's a different problem that what you're arguing against.
• almostdeadguy 4mo ago
  To this point, I've never understood the supposed "alignment" between the EA/AI Safety crowd and Anthropic's mission that the author comments on. Be the stewards of the Machine God, but responsibly? I think the Manhattan project, which AI development is commonly analogized to, had a lot more intrinsic properties to gate against uncontrolled proliferation (which still happened to some extent). Also this is a company that is expected to go public this year, at which point there will be a slew of new voices pushing the company to increase its value, mission be damned. People like Yud at least have a clear consistency in their advocacy that we shouldn't be developing this at all. Anyone who thinks they can reconcile Anthropic's work with the AI safety mission is in total fantasyland, if it's not just a public persona they've adopted strategically.
  • anon373839 4mo ago
    My $.02: I think that these people working at Anthropic are the dumbest bright people alive, with weird and delusional beliefs. And I think the company’s leadership knows how to put them to work in service of Anthropic’s blatantly self-serving, plainly evil agenda. Also, the fact that these employees are now in the position to outbid one another for 8-figure real estate gives them a powerful incentive to keep “believing”.