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https://archive.ph/NEwVz https://archive.ph/NEwVz "However, these inference optimizations, which rival Anthropic refers to as “compute multipliers,” are a big

https://archive.ph/NEwVz https://archive.ph/NEwVz "However, these inference optimizations, which rival Anthropic refers to as “compute multipliers,” are a big focus for all the labs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been publicly talking about the concept since at least mid-2023, when he said on a podcast that the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them. (Compute multipliers can also refer to efficiency optimizations in the model-training phase.)" Yes, on a world with finite resources where your industry is singlehandedly siphoning ALL THE RESOURCES - hoard general efficiency optimizations and treat them as trade secrets - winning is all that matters, normal people and other species and the planet be damned. Everything I hear about Dario these days makes me like him less and less. He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! I guess all the cycles are compressing as we approach the singularity..

razodactyl 3mo ago
Not sure I know where I fall regarding your point: Yes to trade secrets, but also science and AI should be for the good of all. OpenAI seems to be trading roles back with Anthropic becoming misanthropic. I hope they both start heading in the direction of how the AI field was prior to LLMs. Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.
- georgemcbay 3mo ago
  > Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator. Of all the things to never happen, this is never going to happen the most. That train left the station for good once hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars were involved. On the bright side, in the long run I suspect the vast majority of the value of AI will not be captured by the model making labs and the vast investments in them are going to implode, so...
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    implode, how?
    - reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
      They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment, they just want to drive the value of LLM training and inference to zero because we banked the market on it being arbitrarily high margin forever. China was like hold my beer. They have a staggering surplus of grid capacity and can bring more online without any difficulty. We couldn't get a serious nuclear project done if Jeffrey Epstein was offering private flights to the ribbon cutting. In the United States at any given time more than half of the FLOPs are badly misallocated, Meta has like, a double digit percentage of the total capacity going down the drain every day and has for years. That's a conspicuous example but on OpenRouter rankings it's rare to see more than one or two American vendors in the top 10, sometimes the top 20. But 3rd, 4th, and 5th place are all merrily burning half the compute duplicating effort and missing key innovations because we stopped publishing real results. In China if DeepSeek makes a breakthrough it's at Zhupai and Moonshot and MiniMax and MiMo and Qwen that week. Our only lever, export restrictions, seems to do nothing but breed multiply antibiotic resistant super hackers who just get more efficient and immediately propagate all of those efficiencies to the rest of the Chinese AI industry. At the beginning of 2026 there was one Chinese lab with a model that had any real relevance fielding modern tool users. Today in July there are like, eight lagging the absolute frontier by maybe 3-6 months. Barring some massive bend in some curve 3-4 of the top 5 and 6-8 of the top 10 will be Chinese and open weight by January. The great irony in all of this is that our current playbook is straight out of the 1960s USSR, and the PRC's current playbook is straight out of 1960s USA. We're the ones with the opaque decision making and gross resource misallocation driven by the personal agendas of a shadowy cabal of frenemies wired back channel into government in the form of the individuals rather than the offices. They're the ones with a thriving marketplace of ideas powered by robust public/private partnership and a paved path running bidirectionally to the university system. It's going to implode because the Kruschev system does. Theirs is going to thrive because the Kennedy system puts a man on the moon before the decade is out.
deleted 3mo ago
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bigyabai 3mo ago
> He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! What kind of rosy-eyed chump believes in the "tech leader with scruples" bullshit? It always lies. Did some people just ignore Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook's sociopathy, somehow? Did anyone buy into their "privacy is a human right" nonsense?
- cindyllm 3mo ago
  [dead]
- senordevnyc 3mo ago
  I find this kind of cynicism fascinating tbh. On the one hand, it seems so relatable in some ways, because there is something uncomfortable about being seen as naive, in a way that being seen as cynical or negative doesn't seem to carry. I guess it's just self-protective, almost like some kind of perverse Pascal's wager: it's better to think everyone is horrible and be wrong than to think the opposite and be taken advantage of? The thing I can't quite square is that it doesn't really fit my lived experience. I have known sincere, genuine people in the types of positions that I'm sure someone like you would declare to be sociopathic. But beyond that, I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain. Why couldn't someone like Dario (or even Altman, gasp) be sincere? Because if he is, it does seem like a lot of the moves he's made would make sense given his worldview. But if you assume he's just a villain, then you can twist any of those moves to just be further evidence of that which you already believe. I don't know, I just find cynicism interesting, and a little sad.
  - DenisM 3mo ago
    It stops being interesting, or even sad, after a while. People get stuck in all kinds of places, mentally. Some get unstuck eventually. It’s only sad if you have come to a counter factual belief that it could have gone better. I went in the opposite direction - how far can I push myself to see multiple facets of a story? That is a wild ride, and it gets progressively more wild.
    - 3mo ago
llelouch 3mo ago
Dario tells the truth. If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense. They are not bs'ing about that. Also I think most people just read headlines or 10 second clips and make false extrapolations from there. (BTW Anthropic only exists because Sam Altman is a liar, Dario admitted this.)
- nmfisher 3mo ago
  > If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense. Except for, you know, all the outside investors and the forthcoming IPO.
  - adahn 3mo ago
    A no-investment policy would take them off the scene entirely. Essentially handing over the reins to OpenAI, Google, and others. Their position is something close to "if I don't do it, someone worse will". Related: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/ https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-wor... There's a more nuanced discussion that could be had about how to balance relevance with outside influence. But at a foundational level it should be acknowledged that the tradeoff exists, and that receiving outside investment can't alone be seen as evidence of corruption. Besides that, there's more that can be said about other things like their corporate structure or the degree to which they accelerated the AI race.
    - bloppe 3mo ago
      "if I don't do it, someone worse will" Of course that's what Dario thinks because that's what every tech CEO thinks. Dario, Sam, Sundar, probably many Chinese CEOs as well. It's what everyone thinks. That's why they're competing so fiercely with one another. That's why they basically make all the same decisions. That's why we need properly open source AI.
      - solenoid0937 3mo ago
        Open source AI fails first contact with sufficiently-intelligent-as-to-be-dangerous AI. The day Mythos class models are open sourced will not be a good day. I don't think you understand the impact that will have on the world and on cyber defenders everywhere. It will be pure chaos. Even if you don't think Mythos-class is the bar, open source has to stop at some point, you don't hand everyone a superweapon.
alightsoul 3mo ago
i really hope it's just what Deepseek V4 does. Deepseek V4 is very cheap and highly performant OpenAI tried to pull off the same trade secret thing with RL when they announced o1 and o3, aka "Compute time scaling". Then Deepseek revealed it with Deepseek R1. Could also be something like Deepseek DSpark. Or using diffusion like DiffusionGemma as a draft model. The timing between the release of those, and this article, makes me think its maybe one or both of those things
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  deep down, i suspect they're all just drafting on implementations to llamacpp.
KronisLV 3mo ago
> the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them. I wonder if that makes sense if the orgs within the industry are starting to shift their mindset towards "Tokens are expensive, we should use AI less." which feels like an existential threat to the status quo, if those AI providers can't find ways to keep costs affordable for their clients. Otherwise those orgs would just be using GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek V4 Pro but it seems like what they're doing instead is trying to use AI just less, period.
bloppe 3mo ago
I agree that Dario is pretty annoying, but I think the "tech villain" archetype is essentially survivorship bias. The tech leaders who don't act that way are not nearly as visible because they're not nearly as successful.
- solenoid0937 3mo ago
  HN is just a massive Anthropic hate fest now, probably funded/manipulated by OAI's $8B PR budget. OP phrases it as a bad thing that Dario is keeping compute multipliers to Anthropic. How naive can one be? Compute multipliers are the whole business. Those are the trade secrets every lab is built on. It is the alpha of the business. How does protecting this make Dario evil? This website is getting out of hand with the uninformed hot takes. I wish when HN was still people that knew what they were talking about.
  - bloppe 3mo ago
    I'm saying I would do the same thing if I were Dario. I don't think he's evil. I just think his hero complex is annoying.
  - satvikpendem 3mo ago
    > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - versteegen 3mo ago
      Amusing, this is the first time I've seen someone get flagged for quoting the guidelines.
      - satvikpendem 3mo ago
        I am vindicated.
stingraycharles 3mo ago
Ok I’m not sure I follow your point here. Isn’t all that he’s saying that if they find some optimization techniques, that gives them an edge? And that makes sense? How is this suddenly evidence of him being a villain?
- solenoid0937 3mo ago
  It has got to be one of the most insane takes I've read on HN, which to be fair has been trending towards "unhinged" when it comes to Anthropic and AI safety. Compute multipliers are like a quant firm's trading algorithms. They're the crown jewels, the whole alpha of the lab. If you leak them, the lab dies. Protecting them does not make Dario a villain, it's literally his job. It's also Sam's job, Denis's job, Mira's job, etc. Every lab guards these multipliers closely because they represent the entire worth of the lab.
  - alightsoul 3mo ago
    So how can Deepseek publish them without killing themselves?
    - solenoid0937 3mo ago
      Their alpha has been discovered by the other labs. If they took the lead they obviously would not give that up freely.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      Because they are a state-owned enterprise tasked with destroying the aforementioned alpha of private American labs...?
      - alightsoul 3mo ago
        oh here we go again saying everything in china is done by the state. it's not a democracy but they're not the soviet union either. if that were true, why don't they have just one model initiative instead of several?
schnitzelstoat 3mo ago
It gives them a massive advantage because they can cut the cost per token by a lot and eat Anthropic's market share. In what universe is any company going to give that advantage away? In any case if they take away a lot of market share it's basically the same in the end - most people will be using these optimisations.
- alightsoul 3mo ago
  Deepseek gave it away with R1. They did it again with V4 and DSpark. You don't use it because it's Chinese
  - schnitzelstoat 3mo ago
    I'm not American so I don't really care if it's Chinese or not. But at work I can only use the approved Enterprise Plans we have and we only have those with Anthropic and OpenAI.
    - alightsoul 3mo ago
      Companies and people worldwide just use whatever Americans use, because they read English but can't write it. Americans don't use Chinese models because they're Chinese.
      - nijave 3mo ago
        And Chinese don't use American models because they're American. What's your point?
    - pea 3mo ago
      The shift may come when your blessed cloud platform provides competitive enterprise-ready hosting of the oss models
  - kzrdude 3mo ago
    It's available from opencode (non-chinese hosting), additionally deepseek v4-flash is available with rate limits of course, for free, there.
alecco 3mo ago
And Anthropic sure reads and applies all the open research. This 2023 thread about this issue is prescient: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_our_community_must_get_serious_about_opposing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_... (just add Anthropic to OpenAI)
cyanydeez 3mo ago
Keep in mind, these tech leaders have deluded themselves with the infinite jest of "effective altrusim" which can effective ignore any problem today for some imagined future problem that they're solving. So if they have to enslave the human race because there's a super killer asteroid 10 million lightyears away heading towards us, they'll do it, because obviously, saving future humanity is the only thing that makes sense (because only their genius can save the day)!
- estearum 3mo ago
  Side note for other readers: Parent is describing a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism, which is a distinct (but sometimes overlapping) worldview from effective altruism. The primary effective altruism cause areas are extremely acute and high-scale problems like malaria, vaccine distribution, and factory farming

razodactyl 3mo ago

Not sure I know where I fall regarding your point: Yes to trade secrets, but also science and AI should be for the good of all. OpenAI seems to be trading roles back with Anthropic becoming misanthropic. I hope they both start heading in the direction of how the AI field was prior to LLMs. Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.

georgemcbay 3mo ago
> Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator. Of all the things to never happen, this is never going to happen the most. That train left the station for good once hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars were involved. On the bright side, in the long run I suspect the vast majority of the value of AI will not be captured by the model making labs and the vast investments in them are going to implode, so...
- fragmede 3mo ago
  implode, how?
  - reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
    They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment, they just want to drive the value of LLM training and inference to zero because we banked the market on it being arbitrarily high margin forever. China was like hold my beer. They have a staggering surplus of grid capacity and can bring more online without any difficulty. We couldn't get a serious nuclear project done if Jeffrey Epstein was offering private flights to the ribbon cutting. In the United States at any given time more than half of the FLOPs are badly misallocated, Meta has like, a double digit percentage of the total capacity going down the drain every day and has for years. That's a conspicuous example but on OpenRouter rankings it's rare to see more than one or two American vendors in the top 10, sometimes the top 20. But 3rd, 4th, and 5th place are all merrily burning half the compute duplicating effort and missing key innovations because we stopped publishing real results. In China if DeepSeek makes a breakthrough it's at Zhupai and Moonshot and MiniMax and MiMo and Qwen that week. Our only lever, export restrictions, seems to do nothing but breed multiply antibiotic resistant super hackers who just get more efficient and immediately propagate all of those efficiencies to the rest of the Chinese AI industry. At the beginning of 2026 there was one Chinese lab with a model that had any real relevance fielding modern tool users. Today in July there are like, eight lagging the absolute frontier by maybe 3-6 months. Barring some massive bend in some curve 3-4 of the top 5 and 6-8 of the top 10 will be Chinese and open weight by January. The great irony in all of this is that our current playbook is straight out of the 1960s USSR, and the PRC's current playbook is straight out of 1960s USA. We're the ones with the opaque decision making and gross resource misallocation driven by the personal agendas of a shadowy cabal of frenemies wired back channel into government in the form of the individuals rather than the offices. They're the ones with a thriving marketplace of ideas powered by robust public/private partnership and a paved path running bidirectionally to the university system. It's going to implode because the Kruschev system does. Theirs is going to thrive because the Kennedy system puts a man on the moon before the decade is out.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

bigyabai 3mo ago

> He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! What kind of rosy-eyed chump believes in the "tech leader with scruples" bullshit? It always lies. Did some people just ignore Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook's sociopathy, somehow? Did anyone buy into their "privacy is a human right" nonsense?

cindyllm 3mo ago
[dead]
senordevnyc 3mo ago
I find this kind of cynicism fascinating tbh. On the one hand, it seems so relatable in some ways, because there is something uncomfortable about being seen as naive, in a way that being seen as cynical or negative doesn't seem to carry. I guess it's just self-protective, almost like some kind of perverse Pascal's wager: it's better to think everyone is horrible and be wrong than to think the opposite and be taken advantage of? The thing I can't quite square is that it doesn't really fit my lived experience. I have known sincere, genuine people in the types of positions that I'm sure someone like you would declare to be sociopathic. But beyond that, I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain. Why couldn't someone like Dario (or even Altman, gasp) be sincere? Because if he is, it does seem like a lot of the moves he's made would make sense given his worldview. But if you assume he's just a villain, then you can twist any of those moves to just be further evidence of that which you already believe. I don't know, I just find cynicism interesting, and a little sad.
- DenisM 3mo ago
  It stops being interesting, or even sad, after a while. People get stuck in all kinds of places, mentally. Some get unstuck eventually. It’s only sad if you have come to a counter factual belief that it could have gone better. I went in the opposite direction - how far can I push myself to see multiple facets of a story? That is a wild ride, and it gets progressively more wild.
  - 3mo ago

llelouch 3mo ago

Dario tells the truth. If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense. They are not bs'ing about that. Also I think most people just read headlines or 10 second clips and make false extrapolations from there. (BTW Anthropic only exists because Sam Altman is a liar, Dario admitted this.)

nmfisher 3mo ago
> If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense. Except for, you know, all the outside investors and the forthcoming IPO.
- adahn 3mo ago
  A no-investment policy would take them off the scene entirely. Essentially handing over the reins to OpenAI, Google, and others. Their position is something close to "if I don't do it, someone worse will". Related: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/ https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-wor... There's a more nuanced discussion that could be had about how to balance relevance with outside influence. But at a foundational level it should be acknowledged that the tradeoff exists, and that receiving outside investment can't alone be seen as evidence of corruption. Besides that, there's more that can be said about other things like their corporate structure or the degree to which they accelerated the AI race.
  - bloppe 3mo ago
    "if I don't do it, someone worse will" Of course that's what Dario thinks because that's what every tech CEO thinks. Dario, Sam, Sundar, probably many Chinese CEOs as well. It's what everyone thinks. That's why they're competing so fiercely with one another. That's why they basically make all the same decisions. That's why we need properly open source AI.
    - solenoid0937 3mo ago
      Open source AI fails first contact with sufficiently-intelligent-as-to-be-dangerous AI. The day Mythos class models are open sourced will not be a good day. I don't think you understand the impact that will have on the world and on cyber defenders everywhere. It will be pure chaos. Even if you don't think Mythos-class is the bar, open source has to stop at some point, you don't hand everyone a superweapon.

alightsoul 3mo ago

i really hope it's just what Deepseek V4 does. Deepseek V4 is very cheap and highly performant OpenAI tried to pull off the same trade secret thing with RL when they announced o1 and o3, aka "Compute time scaling". Then Deepseek revealed it with Deepseek R1. Could also be something like Deepseek DSpark. Or using diffusion like DiffusionGemma as a draft model. The timing between the release of those, and this article, makes me think its maybe one or both of those things

cyanydeez 3mo ago
deep down, i suspect they're all just drafting on implementations to llamacpp.

KronisLV 3mo ago

> the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them. I wonder if that makes sense if the orgs within the industry are starting to shift their mindset towards "Tokens are expensive, we should use AI less." which feels like an existential threat to the status quo, if those AI providers can't find ways to keep costs affordable for their clients. Otherwise those orgs would just be using GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek V4 Pro but it seems like what they're doing instead is trying to use AI just less, period.

bloppe 3mo ago

I agree that Dario is pretty annoying, but I think the "tech villain" archetype is essentially survivorship bias. The tech leaders who don't act that way are not nearly as visible because they're not nearly as successful.

solenoid0937 3mo ago
HN is just a massive Anthropic hate fest now, probably funded/manipulated by OAI's $8B PR budget. OP phrases it as a bad thing that Dario is keeping compute multipliers to Anthropic. How naive can one be? Compute multipliers are the whole business. Those are the trade secrets every lab is built on. It is the alpha of the business. How does protecting this make Dario evil? This website is getting out of hand with the uninformed hot takes. I wish when HN was still people that knew what they were talking about.
- bloppe 3mo ago
  I'm saying I would do the same thing if I were Dario. I don't think he's evil. I just think his hero complex is annoying.
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - versteegen 3mo ago
    Amusing, this is the first time I've seen someone get flagged for quoting the guidelines.
    - satvikpendem 3mo ago
      I am vindicated.

stingraycharles 3mo ago

Ok I’m not sure I follow your point here. Isn’t all that he’s saying that if they find some optimization techniques, that gives them an edge? And that makes sense? How is this suddenly evidence of him being a villain?

solenoid0937 3mo ago
It has got to be one of the most insane takes I've read on HN, which to be fair has been trending towards "unhinged" when it comes to Anthropic and AI safety. Compute multipliers are like a quant firm's trading algorithms. They're the crown jewels, the whole alpha of the lab. If you leak them, the lab dies. Protecting them does not make Dario a villain, it's literally his job. It's also Sam's job, Denis's job, Mira's job, etc. Every lab guards these multipliers closely because they represent the entire worth of the lab.
- alightsoul 3mo ago
  So how can Deepseek publish them without killing themselves?
  - solenoid0937 3mo ago
    Their alpha has been discovered by the other labs. If they took the lead they obviously would not give that up freely.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    Because they are a state-owned enterprise tasked with destroying the aforementioned alpha of private American labs...?
    - alightsoul 3mo ago
      oh here we go again saying everything in china is done by the state. it's not a democracy but they're not the soviet union either. if that were true, why don't they have just one model initiative instead of several?

schnitzelstoat 3mo ago

It gives them a massive advantage because they can cut the cost per token by a lot and eat Anthropic's market share. In what universe is any company going to give that advantage away? In any case if they take away a lot of market share it's basically the same in the end - most people will be using these optimisations.

alightsoul 3mo ago
Deepseek gave it away with R1. They did it again with V4 and DSpark. You don't use it because it's Chinese
- schnitzelstoat 3mo ago
  I'm not American so I don't really care if it's Chinese or not. But at work I can only use the approved Enterprise Plans we have and we only have those with Anthropic and OpenAI.
  - alightsoul 3mo ago
    Companies and people worldwide just use whatever Americans use, because they read English but can't write it. Americans don't use Chinese models because they're Chinese.
    - nijave 3mo ago
      And Chinese don't use American models because they're American. What's your point?
  - pea 3mo ago
    The shift may come when your blessed cloud platform provides competitive enterprise-ready hosting of the oss models
- kzrdude 3mo ago
  It's available from opencode (non-chinese hosting), additionally deepseek v4-flash is available with rate limits of course, for free, there.

alecco 3mo ago

And Anthropic sure reads and applies all the open research. This 2023 thread about this issue is prescient: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_our_community_must_get_serious_about_opposing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_... (just add Anthropic to OpenAI)

cyanydeez 3mo ago

Keep in mind, these tech leaders have deluded themselves with the infinite jest of "effective altrusim" which can effective ignore any problem today for some imagined future problem that they're solving. So if they have to enslave the human race because there's a super killer asteroid 10 million lightyears away heading towards us, they'll do it, because obviously, saving future humanity is the only thing that makes sense (because only their genius can save the day)!

estearum 3mo ago
Side note for other readers: Parent is describing a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism, which is a distinct (but sometimes overlapping) worldview from effective altruism. The primary effective altruism cause areas are extremely acute and high-scale problems like malaria, vaccine distribution, and factory farming