It’s clear that Anthropic has run out of the compute capacity needed to serve Mythos publicly.
They’re using security concerns to mask their inability to deliver the model at scale, while still trying to maintain their lead over OpenAI. As a result, they’ve chosen to release it privately under the banner of an “ethical” rollout.
Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic said the following at an Oxford lecture last week ([0], at around 10 and 12 mins):
"It's a technology that we do not fully understand because it's more grown than made. And it is a technology that you can concoct plausible scenarios where it could kill every single person on the planet. So to think building this technology is without risk would be an act of hubris or insanity.
[...]
The technology is in fact so powerful that I should clearly state that if it was possible to elegantly slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time as a species to deal with it, that would likely be a good thing. ... But in the absence of a coordinated global slowdown, we are left with the current situation, which is a powerful technology being developed at breakneck speed by a variety of actors and a variety of countries locked in a competition with one another where commercial and geopolitical rivalries are often drowning out the larger existential-to-the-species aspects of the technology being built. This isn't an ideal situation, but it's the one we find ourselves in."
They know they are in a race that no one will win.
It is already very plausible (and has been since the 1950s) without the advent of LLMs. This is just another layer on top of the preexisting and very plausible existential threats we already face.
Task a squirrel with justifying the risk of a fox, but from the biomolecular level. That is the level of the task you are setting out.
There can be arms-races in domains that are unfathomable to the participants. A small mammal will die a billion times over before it understands the evolutionary mechanisms and the genetic playing field on which it loses. Actors are not necessarily privy to understand the means by which they will lose, and humans have only existed in a small window of time in which we fashioned a manicured garden, in which that full understanding was briefly possible. It is not favoured in the universe for us to fully understand our environment imho
If the risk must be exhaustively detailed before it is given credence, we are already doomed, and deservedly so
>Task a squirrel with justifying the risk of a fox, but from the biomolecular level. That is the level of the task you are setting out.
Thats a really deep thought for a 12 year old.
>There can be arms-races in domains that are unfathomable to the participants.
You cant even justify LLMs as being unfathomable. Oh watch out I am fathoming them. You cant stop me fathoming all over the place.
>A small mammal will die a billion times over before it understands the evolutionary mechanisms and the genetic playing field on which it loses.Actors are not necessarily privy to understand the means by which they will lose, and humans have only existed in a small window of time in which we fashioned a manicured garden, in which that full understanding was briefly possible. It is not favoured in the universe for us to fully understand our environment imho
Non Sequitur. One that sounds like it was made up for that "What the Bleep" garbage.
>If the risk must be exhaustively detailed before it is given credence, we are already doomed, and deservedly so
The risk needs to be justified as something more substantial than weird people writing wannabe edgy messages on the internet. If someone on the internet told you that we need to drastically reverse living standards because there's a risk that modern technology will summon King Kong any reasonable person would ask for the working out instead of running for a cave.
Its not like you handed me anything but woo to work with. There's really nothing less respectful than making up absolute nonsense and expecting a kind and thoughtful reply.
No they're right. Regardless if one agrees with you or not, doesn't change the fact that your behavior was that of an asshole. I would know since I'm one too.
This was completely unnecessary. I understand why you say it, you like to make people feel bad. But it was being an asshole, regardless of how you try to justify it.
I'll invite to you our ethical sociopaths group if you want to join.
"Oh what peril we are in where I must get rich by killing all of you" Is a statement that should make you disregard anyone saying it at any time. Either they are liars, or they are so morally bankrupt that they are willing to sacrifice the species for short term satisfaction. Either option makes them more fit for a mental hospital than a stage.
Google (and other labs) wanted to keep the tech internal because of the obvious safety concerns. Once they were confident that the tech was understood and under control, the public could start being drip fed. Everyone on the ground back then was hyper cautious.
Then Altman made ChatGPT public, and the race began.
Yes, Anthropic is compute constrained, even after the SpaceX Colossus deal.
But supply constraints are the normal operating mode of any market. Anthropic could choose to serve whatever models it pleases at whatever price points it chooses and let the market decide where the value is.
If Mythos at $X overwhelms their capacity, they could just charge $X+1. If still overwhelmed, there are larger prices as well.
During periods of market exuberance, it’s in the vendors interest not to reveal where exactly x+1 is. At the moment, everyone just guesstimates the company’s TAM. Bringing certainty to that guesstimate cuts Anthropic off from the most exuberant market participants, bringing their post-IPO price down unnecessarily.
The question is, will anyone pay enough for Mythos to offset the opportunity cost of offering that much Opus? You don't want to end up in a spot where you don't have enough compute and your service's reliability degrades to an unusable state like xAI.
I feel like there's always a demand for the very best models, even at insane prices. If the opportunity cost is x times opus, maybe few but there will always be companies willing to pay x+1 times opus.
And then the bubble would collapse. Corps are already putting limits on token usage across the board because of costs. Increasing costs would significantly contract the hype bubble.
No insider info, but just wanted to mention that pricing signals things too. If Mythos is only servable at $X*Y dollars and isn’t Y times better than $X of compute at another provider, it’s quite possible that affects the IPO price negatively versus the halo of having the worlds most expensive model that is “too powerful to release” unpriced and unbenchmarked.
I think that most people at Anthropic are true believers from my interactions with them so I don’t believe this theory anecdotally. The simplest explanation is that it really is taking a while to gain confidence they won’t be used for a spree of bad cyber attacks. Knowing how long it takes institutions to fix security issues when filed by humans I would be more suprised if this wasn’t the case.
But I would forgive anyone who did think it was deliberately sandbagged; given the staggering sums at play, true believers might believe the ends justify the means to a little “marketing” like this.
It is not "clear", as your comment suggests, it's hidden. Which is semantically the opposite of clear. Regarding your theory, might be true, might be false. But it's highly speculative.
All of us, including you, know that he is not saying "they are being transparent." When someone says "it's clear that..." in this way they're saying "It's clear to us what is really happening here.
It's not clear, there is no tangible proof that Mythos is not released because they don't have compute power to serve it. Saying that would imply that the "too dangerous" is a lie. Nobody has proof. It can feel "clear" for you, but it's not. Hence, I correct it.
Yes I got how they used the phrase. And it was wrong, so I wanted to react. Thanks for your addition, it dissipates any doubt on the intention of OP: he thinks Anthropic is hiding the lack of power by pretending it's too dangerous. But he is wrong to assume that without proof, hence my reaction.
I agree, saying "it's clear" when at best, "it's plausible" doesn't let the conversation happen.
And pretending to know what is going on behind the scene, anon on HN is not credible
I had to patch my Linux boxes daily at some point in the past couple months. I don’t want Mythos to be publicly released for as long as it is economically feasible for Anthropic. I hope they have a gentleman’s agreement with OpenAI and DeepMind about this, too.
Chinese labs will force their hands, until then let’s hope maximum number of projects get patched at a reasonable pace.
I hope that such agreement gets broken hard and given the MSRC cold shoulder. If that means abliterated Qwen et al embarrasses Mythos to deliver a wider rollout, I’ll take that.
Trusting Anthropic to deliver is like asking Microsoft to pay out for bugs.
Yes, 300 MW from SpaceX helps a lot, but I think that’s mainly to support Opus demand, which has grown faster than expected. If Mythos is roughly 5× more expensive to serve than Opus, as the pricing suggests, then 300 MW is nowhere near enough to enable large-scale deployment of Mythos.
As an ordinary developer who relies on a $20–$200/month subscription, I feel disappointed by the release of a paper describing a model that I can’t actually use.
Ok but they can easily upsell this to enterprise customers at a market price reflective of their capacity constraints. Big corps would pay it, this is clearly a major update.
I don't know if any of the big AI labs have confidence in planning for the long term.
For all they know they'll find a new optimization that lets them serve Opus class models for half the computing cost next month. Or someone will invent the next OpenClaw and demand will 10x over night.
OpenAI has been pulling this marketing trick for years. Remember how GPT-3 was too dangerous to release? It's also probably bad PR if script kiddies have access to GPT model with no guardrails even if it doesn't enable any significant attacks.
For GPT-2 and GPT-3 it seems like the concern was that they hadn't yet figured out how to properly write safeguards for it yet:
> The company believes making its API generally available was made possible due to its progress with safeguards, and that opening up the API to all developers will help see applications developed faster. ...
> A large emphasis has been placed on safe use of the tool, which in the past has been criticised for a range of shortcomings, including racism and prejudices against specific genders and religions.
Maybe, but they certainly used it for marketing too. At the time they contacted a bunch of publications and gave them access but told them they could only share snippets of the output [1]. The only reason to set restrictions like that is marketing.
> Now, OpenAI's terms of service don't let me give you the full list. I have to curate them, and show you a sample. Those are the terms and conditions I agreed to.
Why do you think that? All these rumors about compute constraint just seem like speculation and not based on any data or information. All they would need to do is increase their prices to free up compute capacity.
Probably. This is an 8-12 trillion-parameter model, which is why it costs so much, that is also a major reason, besides RL and synthetic data, why it suddenly gained these new capabilities. They claim it was not fine-tuned or trained specifically for cybersecurity, but is instead a general purpose model.
The security concerns argument would have worked better if a forum full of people hadn't promptly obtained access by the extremely sophisticated tactic of guessing its URL...
Opus is definitely in its own league. I use Kimi/Gemini-cli code regularly to save cost and from my experience, Kimi 2.5 is more solid than Gemini Flash 3.0 for coding. While Gemini Flash 3.0 is generally faster, it usually break the syntax and skip important prompt. Kimi 2.5 can write very good code and can plan very well.
Except that, In OpenRouter, Deepseek always maintain in Top 10 Ranking. Although I did not use it personally, i believe that their main advantage over other model is price/performance.
There are a lot of applications where you really just want a cheap and efficient model that's still somewhat competitive and that's exactly the niche DeepSeek fulfills the best.
I think the opposite. Having NVIDIA investing in TSMC's bleeding-edge process node should benefit Apple rather than disadvantage.
It means that Apple doesn't have to be sole investor in latest node development which is more harder to justify, especially in the year where smartphone upgrade cycle is slowdown. Having NVIDIA (and AI boom) in the picture should help Apple reduce CAPEX for their semi-conductor investment.
AI has the effect of making whatever it creates feel worthless. Something AI made says “this wasn’t worth spending any time on. It’s not something important ” Seeing something you care about become part of that Sucks.
I see value (or lack of it) in what I have in front of me, not in how much a person had to struggle and suffer for it to come into existence.
Either something is good or it’s not. Creating something good can sometimes take a lot of effort, but it’s not the effort that makes it good. Otherwise digging a hole and filling it back up would be a valuable undertaking.
What you are saying is that you either do not understand or do not care for craft (it’s an observation, not a criticism), but craft has definite value beyond the end result. Effort does play a huge part, including in animation.
The lights in windows on the background of Akira, for example, were painstakingly painted one by one. That takes skill. That is impressive. It’s the kind of work that makes one with an appreciation for art (which goes beyond “pretty picture”) take another look and imagine what the artist was feeling and thinking as they were working. It makes you wonder about exact techniques and how to improve them, how to create something new.
All of that enhances the appreciation for the movie. The craft, the skill, the sweat put into it to make a hard and grandiose vision plays into how good and influential it has become.
Had those buildings just been spit out by gen AI along with everything else, there would be no value to taking a second look. You’d probably be looking at distorted images anyway, and even if you weren’t it’d just be a bunch of pixels with no intentionality to it. If no one put effort into the details, there’s no reason to look at them. The converse is also true.
I do care for craft, but I don’t view it as an end in itself. The value of craft lies in what it creates, and that value reflects back on the undertaking itself.
But if a machine can replicate mechanically what takes a human effort and ingenuity to do, a human doing the same thing through effort and ingenuity doesn’t magically add further value. And this is understood quite universally; that’s why no human practices the craft of multiplying large numbers anymore.
The part of craft that can be replicated mechanically is the least interesting and valuable part of art.
This is what AI art supporters fail to understand because few if any of them actually practice the craft they emulate. They tend to only work with code and algorithms for which there is no fundamental human expression involved. They assume that because apart from rote intellect and memory the human experience is meaningless in regards to coding as they are acting merely a means of inputting instructions into a machine, that the human experience is equally meaningless for all creative endeavors.
However the value lies not in the technical aspects of craft as an end (which, mind you, no AI is actually good at yet) but as a means of expressing the human experience of an artist and their relationship to the viewer. That dialogue isn't something an LLM can replicate because by definition humanity isn't something an LLM can experience. And even if perfectly mastered on a technical level, it wouldn't have the same value as human expression just as a skillful forgery doesn't have the same value as an original.
> The part of craft that can be replicated mechanically is the least interesting and valuable part of art.
Everything humans do can be replicated mechanically. We’re biological machines, and crafts are just behaviors, not some mystical feat that somehow defies replication or analysis. And there can be no reasonable doubt that machines will replicate (and indeed surpass) everything human very soon.
This doesn't actually refute my comment, even given the assumption that your predictions prove correct. Even given a purely physicalist universe and a machine perfectly capable of replicating all human endeavors, most humans will find more value in human expression.
That doesn't require any argument from mysticism, just an understanding that the context of humanity has value for most humans (perhaps not you, but most humans) beyond the pure transactional mechanisms of value creation, stimulus and response.
No, it doesn’t have to take effort, but that does mean that someone genuinely cares.
Like, I love blog posts. Really do, I’ll read anyone’s about anything. Someone thought of something and cared about it and put it into the world and that’s wonderful.
But someone making an AI post doesn’t care. And worse, it makes anyone who does care feel silly, like, why am I wasting my time on this thing that’s so worthless that whatever the first thing the computer spits out is good enough for them
AI output often 'looks like something' on first try, which makes it easy to assume no effort went in.
But there's a big difference between prompting and accepting the first output versus someone using search, multiple LLMs, actually READING the underlying papers, and iterating until it's done.
Sometimes that still means getting to 'done' faster than by more traditional means. Sometimes it means more depth than you'd manage otherwise. Sometimes somewhere in between.
Of course, by that point, either way, it doesn't really look like lazy AI output anymore.
Maybe it's not so much about the tools/agents as it is about the intent-to-engage behind them?
Okay. Let's say we find out tomorrow that Spirited Away was animated via generative AI. Unbeknownst to everyone, Ghibli has a top-secret AI division which—thanks to some key lucky breakthroughs—is many decades ahead of everyone else and has been for a long time. The animators are a front to hide the truth; Miyazaki's anti-AI declarations were pure jealousy.
You miss something critical here. For that to happen that GenAI would have had to be trained on another "Ghibli".
So your question isn't whether Ghibli had an AI, but whether Ghibli had a whole time traveling machine with it.
Your question feels like asking whether Einstein, Plato, etc. were secretly time travelers and copied someone else's style.
Something that is a general problem with all GenAI is that they copy and imitate. And just like with code being messy and dumb you'll find that Stable Diffusion in pieces of art does stupid and dumb stuff. Things it wasn't trained on. You can most prominently see that in big detailed fantasy (as in not just a photo) pictures, and looking at details. While the overall thing "looks cool" you don't get the details that artists do and you notice a lot of silly, dumb and what for a human author would be a "strange thing to invest time in and still do so badly" kind of situation.
I'd argue if we had AI in the sense that it had actually understood things and it could actually show creativity, etc. the story might be different, but as of today it is unknown whether that's possible. It would make sense, just like alien life would make a lot of sense. But for both actually thinking systems and alien life we have no clue how close we are to seeing one.
Every time someone takes an unbiased look at it (and there are many papers) it is shown that there is no understanding of anything, which to be fair is far from surprising given what the "training" (which is just a term that is an allegory and something that is kinda simulated, but also not really).
There might very well be hard and pretty obvious limitations, such as to feel and express like a human you need to be a human or provide away to simulate that and if you look at biology, anatomy, medicine, etc. you'll soon realize that even if we had technical means to do so we simply don't know most things yet, otherwise we could likely make Alzheimer, artificial brains, etc.
The topic then might be aside from all the ethical parts (when does something have human rights), whether a superhuman as all the futurists believe there will be even be able to create something of value to a regular human or are the experiences just too different. It can already be hard to get anything out of art you cannot relate to other than general analytical interest. However on that side of things Spirited Away already might be on the "little value" side.
This isn't to defend human creation per se, but to counter often completely off understanding of what GenAI is and does.
One final comparison: We already have huge amounts of people capable of reproducing Gibli and other art. Their work might be devalued (even though I'd assume some art their own stuff into their work).
People don't buy a Picasso, because they can't find a copy or a print that even has added benefits such as requiring as much care, being cheaper. Einstein isn't unimportant today, because you learn about his work in school or on Wikipedia.
But your question is like asking whether Einstein's work would be without value, if he secretly had Wikipedia.
> You miss something critical here. For that to happen that GenAI would have had to be trained on another "Ghibli".
Eh, maybe it got trained on Nausicaä, and then a lot of prompting and manual touch up work was used to adapt the style to what we now know as Spirited Away. Or maybe that animation department wasn't completely for show and they did draw some reference frames, but the AI figured out everything in between.
I don't really want to get into a discussion about the theoretical limits of AI, because I don't know what they are and I don't think anyone does. But if "the process is important for art," what happens if the creator lies about the process? If you initially experience the art without knowing about the lie, does learning the truth retroactively erase your previous experience? How does that make sense?
It has always seemed more logical to me that the final piece ought to be all that matters when evaluating art, and any details you know about the creator or process should be ignored to the greatest extent possible. That's difficult to do in many cases, but it can be a goal. I'm also aware that lots of people disagree with me on this.
Spirited Away is an intricate expression of Miyazaki's ethics as formed by his unique lived experience and nostalgia for classical Japanese culture, as well as a criticism of Western capitalist excess filtered through Shinto philosophy.
There is literally no universe in which a generative AI creates a work of art of that magnitude. You can get "make this meme is the style of Ghibli" from an AI and it can imitate the most facile properties of the style but that still requires the style to imitate. AI is never going to generate the genius of Hayao Miyazaki from first principles, that isn't even possible.
the process is not important for art, although it might have value for people. art is a subjective experience, one that comes to life in the obeserver.
imo a massive problem with generative AI is in communication skills of its creators.
Look at Google Gemini and how it's accepted. The only two differences between it and the rest is that it's made by Google, and they don't brag about disrupting the society or damaging its workings(Google do disrupt the society and damage its workings).
It's one thing to design a shotgun, it's another to give it a commercial name "Street Sweeper". The latter is asking to be treated unfairly. Torrenting bunch of media contents and brandishing the runnable blobs as weapons that kill all $classes_of_good_people just isn't and never was the way you communicate anything to anyone.
In many ways, it is a zero-sum game. Art is a form of communication, and people have a finite amount of time and attention. Some people enjoy seeing the craftsmanship of artists, and some artists enjoy displaying their mastery of the craft. Beyond that, people use craftsmanship as a proxy for care/thought put into a work. If you can successfully mimic the appearance of craftsmanship without the effort, a major incentive for artists to create, polish, and publish their work is now gone. If you're someone who enjoys viewing craftsmanship, or who tries to find for high quality work based on the craftsmanship put into it, how long will you be willing to look through a sea of increasingly convincing noise to find some kind of signal?
Studio Ghibli doesn’t want the style “amplified”. That brings them no benefit, it’s only detrimental, and they’ve made that abundantly clear.
They are one of the best, most popular and influential animation studios ever. That you had never heard of them suggests you have little to no interest in animation, which is perfectly fine but also means you’re not their target audience.
IMHO, this remains a great space to explore. You type some formal specification in e.g. Hoare logic, and a mix of SAT/SMT and LLMs autocomplete it. Correct by definition.
It would also facilitate keeping engineers in the loop, who would decompose the problem into an appropriate set of formally specified functions.
They could also chip in when necessary to complete difficult proofs or redefine the functions.
Another possibility is to automatically annotate a software with assertions, preconditions, postconditions or other verification annotations based on the languages semantics and programmer intent, and then run a verifier on the result and evolve the program and annotations based on that intent. So for C, it could fill in data needed by Frama-C.
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