That's a different problem that what you're arguing against.

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.

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.

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.

Not for now, but how long before we have KYC regulations concerning LLMs?

It can be done through the magic of SSD offload. The worst case involves seconds-per-token speeds, but that's OK if you only care about low volumes of slow unattended inference, which maximizes utilization for the hardware.

(The real worst case, where you're streaming the whole model from the cheapest storage you could feasibly think of, involves multiple minutes per token for a single inference, or even hours per token batch if you're doing many inferences in bulk. That's a lot less helpful, so there's a space for smaller models at the edge, even for unattended workloads.)

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.

> 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.

What do you disagree with exactly?

Reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation → RISC-V International move to Switzerland. Around the time some dumbass Republicans tried to impose export restrictions on a set of open, world-wide used specifications.

Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no closing it. Capable AI models will be everywhere.

If you are to believe Anthropic, Fable was export controlled for bug finding, not for exploit construction. They seem to be working to make this the "bright line" for LLMs being a national security risk. My guess is that will be the case they take to Washington this week.

The factory does decent software engineering - for which it can also use the same llm - so that when an attacker does either, a sota llm does not find bugs to exploit.

I'm currently spending $200 for Claude. That's around my maximum that I can afford. I could stretch that to $500 I guess. But I saw reports of people spending tens of thousands of dollars with Claude API. That's certainly outside of my budget.

So if/when Anthropic decides to stop subsidizing subscription (if they ever do that thing, I still not sure about that), I'll certainly look at the other options. And available "open weights" LLMs hosted by someone will be my first pick. Right now Claude 4.8 feels very advanced, but things move very fast...

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.

Is not

We sent open weight models against a codebase to find vulnerabilities.

Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems.

This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want.

Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good

It's questionable whether the current government can even unite the talent required for this project. Seizing it might just push all the talent to Europe or China.

The idea of open-sourcing something that falls into the "national security" category is clearly a non-starter unless there's more powerful, classified models that can outmatch them.

I think Anthropic has clearly demonstrated the most responsibility here: they've been crying for regulations, they were careful about Project Glasswing, and they've got comically over-sensitive filters around numerous topics.

1) It’s safe to assume the US would do its best to prevent it, and even if Anthropic was successful in exfiltrating their data, code, models, and people, I’d imagine the US would immediately block all US companies from working with them. So they’d be blocked from their own US-based compute, plus Google, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, etc.

2) Where would they go? China maybe, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t have sufficient compute for Anthropic’s level of need. The EU likely as or more restrictive in different ways to the US - the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation. Some Middle Eastern countries might have the money, energy, and interest in carving out such a position, but no compute. Plus I’d imagine the US would act directly against any country or region receiving them, economic or otherwise.

3) Then, as said elsewhere, the US would block GPU sales to wherever they found a safe haven, preventing the buildup of the compute they’d need to continue.

This too, will end up being a good thing for them. The ban will end up getting lifted due to some "amazing deal" in the coming weeks and Anthropic will now have the "Trump tried to ban them, so they MUST have the most advanced AI model in the world!" stamp of approval just before IPO.

All this stuff is pro wrestling kayfabe.

> Anthropic models have consistently been top-scoring in BullshitBench[0]

eyeroll I find that Anthropic models feel big and dumber.

https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmar... puts Fable 5th, which seems about right to me.

I'm interested in code utility and correctness, even if the majority of AI use is not focused on that.

So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.

I think assuming you have the ability to guard a tool (that you're "selling" for profit) from mis-use is the definition of "controlling behavior".

It's the kind of ethically myopic take that can only really exist in this new digital age - where tools aren't actually sold, they're just digitally rented.

The most telling part of the "control" narrative is that they happily classify "competition" as mis-use. We're headed back to serfdom on a speedrun.

Doesn't this *exclude* allies countries?

Or, maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is: MoE is just an architecture to keep the activated weights smaller per token. The experts get routed basically token-by-token, and the "experts" themselves don't have a semantic domain so the "expert" word was maybe a poor choice.

GPT refused to do so (citing that it's illegal even though I own the games). Deepseek did a wonderful job for 7 cents.

At work I use Opus because, why not? But I could easily switch to a less capable model if needed.

BTW, I also use DeepSeek v4 Flash very frequently: fast and so cheap it is almost free.

The amount of tokens required to properly distill a frontier model is so large that by the time you could consume the # of tokens you would either be banned for extremely obvious abuse or a new model would be released, rendering your efforts less and less valuable over time. Intelligence is not a linear thing. Being behind just a little bit can have exponential consequences.

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.

You talk to a smart, heavy model to build a plan composed of smaller steps. Then you have the heavy model spin up smaller, cheaper LLMs to actually implement the tasks.

The heavy model is basically read-only in that mode. It can read files, execute tests, etc, but it can’t write code. It just tracks what needs to be done, offloads the work to dumber LLMs, validates the task is done, and moves on to the next step.

It sort of pushes humans up the stack. Instead of having a human sitting there prompting the LLM to start the next task, you have another LLM do that loop.

It’s been on my list to try out.

"The sparsely-gated MoE layer,[21] published by researchers from Google Brain, uses feedforward networks as experts, and linear-softmax gating. Similar to the previously proposed hard MoE, they achieve sparsity by a weighted sum of only the top-k experts, instead of the weighted sum of all of them."

"Top-k experts," in case of some DeepSeek's models k=1.

https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/fusion-beats-fronti...

In the. US at least it is actually illegal to download ISOs/roms of games, even if you own a physical copy. It's a stupid law and as a downloader (as opposed to the people hosting the files) your chances of getting into any kind of actual legal trouble are effectively 0, but it is still against the law.

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.

Cursor's $20 a month plan provides a reasonable amount of Opus tokens as well.

Modern society is built on the idea that competition is required from companies, and we seem to be exiting that age into a new world of monolithic, monopolistic, mega-corps. Personally, I find that a real route to dystopia.

Where do you draw the line here?

What happens when your car stops working because you're driving a tesla, but you're working on EVs for Honda or Ford?

What happens when your macbook stops working, because you decided to commit to changes to ARM software, or RISC-V?

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And before you dismiss those, this is literally what Anthropic is doing TODAY. Using their tools to develop competing tools is something they classify as mis-use, and shut you down for doing.

Personally, I just can't accept that as a valid moral stance. Wonderfully successful, abusive, and dystopian? Absolutely. Moral? FUCK NO.

When tools turn themselves off because the manufacturer has decided it doesn't like how you're using them... you're a slave with no autonomy.

> So... what, you just don't trust anyone good?

The baseline here is apparently that they are good, I’m just supposed to trust and shut up?

Installing safeguards to prevent a tool from being used for certain things is a perfectly natural and common thing to do when you are providing the tool as a service. For example, blocking VPNs and open proxies from accessing a free service if those are a major source of spam and abuse. Note that Anthropic never provided the model for offline use in a form that includes DRM -- they are simply safeguarding the service that provides access to the hosted model. The only ethical concern I see here is that some of their safeguards are ones I wouldn't personally agree with, and in a world where dependence on a model is expected it can become an issue if the model refuses to perform in some cases, etc., but that doesn't automatically mean the refusal itself is unethical unless that issue was known and expected (and unless the alternative is not bigger, worse bads)

Also note you are not even "digitally renting" anything. This is the exact same type of thing as, say, real humans in real life refusing to perform services for certain clients or under certain circumstances. Networking makes it possible to decouple some of these things, but that doesn't magically make it renting or automatically turn a refusal to perform services into an attempt to control clients. Just the same as I can choose to refuse any request, which does not automatically constitute attempted control over the asker. There can be ethical concerns about whether my refusal causes problems that I'm obligated to avoid (and whether or not such obligation exists), but that doesn't automatically contaminate the refusal itself unless I have knowledge of and intend the bad.

To use a much more relevant example, Anthropic's refusal to allow its models to be used for war (among other things) does not constitute any attempt to prevent war. It's only a refusal to assist in it. That's not some unfair, unethical attempt at controlling the government, that's just Anthropic not wanting to be responsible for assisting in war.

whats the basis for this thought

The parallelism is where this starts to fall apart on a local PC. Like I can run some Qwen quants, but I can’t run a decent Qwen model while also running another model smart enough to actually implement it. I’d have to do them in series, and given how long Fable seems to take even with parallelism, I’d probably be waiting days for an answer.

That's not the problem.

The US government can export ban GPUs like they do now to more countries if needed. Even if the infrastructure exists, the GPUs won't.

Like, there's a very critical point where you are asking to use their servers to directly compete with them.

This has been normal for somewhere between "decades" and "the entire history of commerce"

Or even just propose an alternative: who has a better track record, here? Who DO you trust?

What limitations does bunny.net have?

What happens when your car stops working because you're driving a tesla, but you're working on EVs for Honda or Ford?

What happens when your macbook stops working, because you decided to commit to changes to ARM software, or RISC-V?

Tools should be neutral. The idea that a tool can only be wielded in a manner that its manufacturer approves of is... scary.

That's a real quick hop and a jump to a really, really ugly spot, societally speaking.

And sure - technically Anthropic is selling a service, but even that idea makes me quietly upset. The only reason they don't sell a product as a tool itself is that they have more control over the model as a service, and expect to be able to extract even more profit from their customers with this route.

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My real hope is that open models FUCKING CRUSH them. Because almost nothing is scarier than a self-righteous, moral zealot.

Again, for Claude, (2) it’s rumored that their API rates have around a 90% profit margin. It’s also claimed that the subscription limits get you around 10x tokens per monthly dollar vs buying them with API rates.

Edit: to drive it home. If a tokens true cost to anthropic is 1/10 of what they sell it for at API rates, and a subscription gets you tokens at 1/10 the price, that’s cost-neutral for the business if every subscription uses every token. They’re selling tokens at cost, not at a loss. Many subscription users won’t use their full allotment. That means serving some users doesn’t cost the business as much - which might push the subscription business from cost neutral to profitable.

A huge free tier (technically, none)

s/Tech/Tech Companies

Tech did it to themselves. People like and want technology. What they don't like and don't want more of is enshittified, user hostile technology. The answer is out there, but our collective school systems failed to teach computing irt free software/open source and instead schools themselves all bought in on enshittified, proprietary tech, or even just dumped trying to teach computing at all outside of "how to login to google classroom and google docs"

I grew up lucky, in that my dad was a dev, my first PC as a kid ran red hat, my high school had an intro to programming class (in BAISC lol). It shaped how I approached computing growing up, and my values. It makes me look at the things we have now and think "No, you're just repackaging community free software and selling it back to me, I'll pass on that."

That experience isn't available to anyone born after that specific era, instead their tech experience is shaped by walled gardens, vendor lock-in, and straight up hostile and manipulative software, so its no wonder they are tired of it. They don't even know a different world (of software) exists.

"It's good enough" was said about GPT-4, o1, o3, Opus 4 and more. Guess what happened? Newer models released, people updated their expectations of what LLMs can do, usage got more aggressive, and somehow, GPT-4 went from "good enough" to "obsolete trash".

If you have no imagination, then at least substitute your pattern recognition for it.

The world is hungry for capabilities. There are piles upon piles of tasks that aren't done by LLMs simply because LLMs aren't good enough to do them.

The thing a frontier model gives you is "you don't have to babysit a model to get it to do X", and that X gets more and more impressive release to release.

As someone on the "safety side of tech", social media is being exploited to increase surveillance and government control precisely because its actual social influence is heavily on the wane, and capital is happy to sacrifice what's left to increase the profits of the expanding public/private tech surveillance industry (with "protect the children" controls on social media like age verification being the usual backdoor route it always is).

Society may be growing tired of Tech, but governments aren't, and in fact they're heavily expanding their back channel reliance on not-traditionally-military Tech as an extension of their Defense spending.

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.

The yoke of silicon valley is feeling heavy. People might just throw it off.

You do your AI-maximalism, and I'll stick to making trade-offs based on the needs of each piece of work.

in general I agree people should be reading a lot more sci-fi nowadays than they used to.

Social media was being exploited from inception. Palantir had sales documents for sock puppet management software back in the PHP era.

I don’t disagree that Government is interested in tech, but I will push back on the dismissal of child safety that is inherent in your comment, intended or not.

For all that some people in the firm may have tried to do the right thing, Social media firms have created bad outcomes for children, and executives were briefed on the harms they were going to cause.

This is the dismissal that concerns me, because it ends up miscalculating the level of anger and unhappiness amongst the voting populace, and therefore the political will to pass regulation to reign tech in.

I'll do more "per-task model selection" when AIs themselves get good at it.

There are numerous bills to limit AI access for consumers, to combat deepfakes hurting children. There are no bills introduced or passed to prevent AI being used to target dronestrikes that kill children abroad, or surveil children domestically.

What the public wants doesn't actually matter right now, only what the government will allow to let pass, which in this case is additional internet surveillance.

Under a future, better government this may change, but (sadly) nothing is going to sink tech's dominance right now.

The anger and unhappiness against tech is good, and hopefully someday they'll burn down all the data centers and I'll never have to hear the words Cloud Computing again, but (to paraphrase a famous Eve Online interaction) it's not going to be today, and it's not going to be us.