> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
My bet is working through an abstraction layer (LLMs) will make crafting a fun game more difficult. The art of designing a (great) game is in the details. English is not sufficient to communicate the individual strokes of a brush on canvas.
Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.
For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me.
I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.
You have to have the models the create tools for you to paint.
I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.
I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.
So I told Codex:
- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)
- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh
- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need
- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things
And I got my desired look within a few seconds.
The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer
That has been true even without AI.
Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.
Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.
Programming is the easiest part of game dev.
Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.
So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.
A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
Strong AI enthusiasm like on there and poor taste tend to correlate pretty strongly. I'm sure there are lots of developers using LLMs to assist with the boring work of coding and keeping mostly quiet about it, still keeping it on a short lead & doing the more creative parts themselves. There have always been indie developers who hate coding and see it as just a necessary step to get their idea out the door, and they still make good games. All the dialogue in Undertale is implemented in a giant 5k+LOC switch statement.
Yeah I’ve been working on a game just for my kids, it convinced me to upgrade to Codex Pro and I absolutely wouldn’t release it to anyone until I felt 100% it actually was fun to play. It’s easy to get stuck not doing the stuff that can’t be automated. The crazy thing is that making the game pretty good looking (like Nintendo Switch level graphics) is basically trivial now and can be largely automated, maybe with a little Blender cleanup for your most important assets. That doesn’t make a game fun though.
Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.
On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.
Let LLMs help you with coding. Design the game and the mechanics yourself. I can see this being an incredibly empowering tool in the right game developer's hands; but if you come into it with a token-maxxing / AI-maxxing mentality, I doubt you'll make a fun game to play.
Well I've enjoyed making little "flash" like games with AI. I have a SKILL.md for how to build out a pico8 game that it updates when it finishes a game.
I give it an rough idea, or none and have it make a game.
See if there something here you enjoy to convince you I do think AI can slowly as they improve make more variety of lightweight 15 minute games.
I ran into this wall too. Someone here on HN said their general test is “make a browser only simple rts game with no AI and no multiplayer” What makes a game fun is very different than the engine of a game. My kid asked me to make a game where you brew potions. Okay, done. Adding ingredients, having physics to drop the items rather than “okay they just appear in the pot” (or worse it just says “okay they’re in there!”) Especially for kids there’s a physicality you have to capture to make it both fun and understandable to a seven year old.
Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.
There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”
Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).
The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.
Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.
>> And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code.
But those games have already been designed a specific way, based on the developer's ideas and imagination and vision.
If you're the sort of person who always thinks along the lines of "I wish there was a way to upgrade spells" or "it would be great if you could open this door and see what is behind it" or "I hate the way orcs and goblins are friends, they should actually fight each other"
That has always been the issue with games: they capture the imagination... and then stop there. There's no way to expand them the way you want (except for submitting requests/wishes to the devs and hope they listen and add it in a short enough time period) and customization options are always very limited.
AI, on the other hand, empowers everyone to bring their own ideas to life. Sure, those ideas may not be great, or the execution may not be great, but at the end of the day it's a way to express one's imagination that would otherwise take years to do.
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
This is very reminiscent of the NSA's attempt to limit crypto access of websites in the 90s. We were very close to having the U.S. ban SSL right when it was becoming the clear solution for safe open web transfers for payments.
I assume only the weight of economic pressure and lack of alternatives (and plenty of opposition) kept the doors open, but the same "national interest and security" BS was trotted out then, too.
Big difference this time is nobody needs Fable/Mythos to accomplish anything. There is no magic line here, only improved connective work with less intervention. But it stands to reason that this will cause a huge chilling effect on AI development in the U.S. if it stands and other labs will eventually bypass Fable/Mythos in capability.
To use a car analogy, the models are being built like engine improvements, sometimes going from V6 to V8, but other orgs might improve the car's wind resistance or fuel injection, which leads to a similar speed improvements. There is a lot of space for improvements all along the chain which is why this is such a pointless move.
Knowing this administration (and Anthropic's ham-fisted tactics) this ends in a week or less with some sort of "deal" and was all part of some high stakes negotiation. Possibly even beneficial to Anthropic, because where does it leave OpenAI once they settle on some sweetheart deal? The precedent is set.
Lots of people on HN, and lots of chronic forum users, think that being skeptical/bitter/cynical makes them sound smarter.
Most nerds (like myself) outgrew this edgy mentality in highschool/college. Realistically this mentality just makes it impossible to see anything except through the darkest possible lens.
This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.
Right, but the widespread literacy took generations to take hold. But, the threat was immediate.
I think, in the long run, of course AI is a boon. But I’m not immortal, and right now it’s a threat to all our livelihoods. We should put ourselves first, and be selfish, while we’re still alive to be selfish.
And if they didn't have this all of HN would rant about how they aren't even telling you that their best model is unavailable, despite having a subscription.
If they tell you, it's a marketing stunt; if they don't, they're being deceptive.
I fully agree and this other side of excessive scepticism people are ruining it for everyone else. They are a big distraction. They keep saying things like:
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
>This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us.
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
This is so true, if anyone posts any positive aspect of AI, those comments are downvoted to abyss. As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety and saying AI is evil and must be stopped is so selfish when AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
What’s so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
> As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?
Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
All that happened was announcing said potential risks and then continuing to launch and push and release it anyways. Something that Anthropic continues to do under his leadership.
Google also analyzed for risks earlier in development of "Meena" and "Bard" and chose not to release, instead. And then got caught flatfooted when OpenAI did so anyways. (They also I think didn't really see a compelling business case for public propagation of it, either).
It starts to look very much like what is really happening with Anthropic is a lot of cynical attempts at regulatory capture. Make grand proclamations. Get your stuff out there first. Ask for regulation and then kick the ladder away from underneath you. But they did it clumsily and failed to grease the right palms.
I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they?
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
Generate misleading news articles
Impersonate others online
Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
Automate the production of spam/phishing content
> These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the “deep fakes (opens in a new window)” phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.
These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.
With ai I can get government bodies to do their job. Escalate and make formal complaints until it’s done. Manually would take ages to find the right law and draft a proper complaint.
AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
"Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors have friends up and down the administration — the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that it’s no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
A requirement of digital sovereignty is the ability to build competitive digital companies. It seems unlikely to me at this point that the EU is going to turn that ship around.
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
This kills the entire enterprise market for AI models better than Opus 4.8
1) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician.
2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee of each and every enterprise customer in order to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
This is the first impression I got, a glass ceiling on AI that will hit the market hard. Timing was right at the late Friday's let's-avoid-the-crash point, we'll see how this flies on Monday.
But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.
Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!
The much-decried EU AI Act provides a safe, predictable regulatory framework to base ones AI development on. It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.
If AI companies have any sort of sense in them, they'd be well-advised to consider relocating to Europe.
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
If you’ve seen what people will do for $500 it seems impossible to trust people you don’t know, at all, who have multi million let alone billion dollar incentives.
Have you seen what people do to their own family members over inheritances? You “trust” OpenAI?
> Some people over on HN and Reddit are already talking about how this represents the high water mark for what the government will ‘allow’ people to access. You can have all the demand in the world, and it won’t matter a lick if the government just won’t let you have it.
Black market LLMs are straight out of a William Gibson story.
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
Having used and watched others use Fable, it's clear to me that the standard of care for these models done by Anthropic pre-release was nothing like their previous releases. It seemed like shortcuts were taken to get it released. Maybe the models are changing faster than their team can adapt, and maybe the government responded as quickly as they did because of their relationship with Anthropic. Regardless, I think regulation was appropriate here. Anthropic can take the time to refine and improve their internal models to have a more successful release next time. It is normal for the government to restrict potentially dangerous companies if the level of care seems below what is acceptable in the US. We've seen it a lot recently with FAA grounding rocket companies. I don't feel it is cruel treatment just cause it's Anthropic
Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
> If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
That's not what's going on. But, what's going on has always been possible. Even to this day, there's software that's is subject to export controls. There's also an often-changing list of countries that US-based companies are prohibited from doing any business with. For software, this has been going on since the 1990s. "Weirdly", the US-based software business has been doing really well.
Anthropic was instructed to prevent Foreign Nationals from using a subset of their software. Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.
Anthropic had other options. One of those options was to gate access to the software behind the ID, biometrics, and -if present- passport capture that Big Tech seems to be very excited to do. I expect that -if they end up changing anything at all about access control- we'll see them doing something very similar to that in the coming weeks.
>Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.
>Anthropic had other options.
Well, not exactly. They weren't given prior notice and a deadline to comply. That was really the only option to comply with the order. However, things may change in the future
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
We're truly lost when we can't see that there is such a thing as good government and bad government. That there is a difference between corruption and modern liberal regulation that follows fair rules. That we can't see that it's ok to regulate CFCs to prevent ozone catastrophe, and not ok to use back room deals to pick favorites. It's not about sides or teams, but there is still right and wrong even in the administration of nation states. And we fluctuate along a gradient with our governments, sometimes its better, sometimes its worse, never perfect, but sometimes much better.
I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government. They just disagree about which one is the good one and which is the bad one.
The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.
A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.
Alas I suspect the two major forms of government in the US have their own visions of good and bad across the board when there should be no disagreement on issues like CFCs were bad and that we need to break our addiction to coal. But good luck on that when the system itself only rewards short-term achievements and private money is now effectively unlimited. I have issues with both options, but many more issues with one side. But I am fed up with having only two options and picking the lesser of two evils that mostly drop their differences to keep the electoral status quo intact.
You are correct: there is a right and wrong. Rights are actions which do not initiate harm in the form of murder, assault, rape, theft, trespass, coercion, or deception. Wrong actions are the initiation of harm.
What is truly lost is the ability to assess on first principles. You are afraid of an outcome, and think "good government" is going to protect you from that risk. A better master who will gaurd you instead of whip you is your end point. It is actually reflective of your character.
We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined.
Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".
> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).
This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.
Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.
By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).
I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.
You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
Agreed. It feels intellectually childish to say we can never have any government because of corruption. This government is flagrantly corrupt, has publicly ignored the courts, and weaponized the DOJ. This is not normal.
I’m pretty certain that most of my issues are with a specific kind of government, not with government in general.
Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
This. There really is no such thing as an entirely good government. Government is composed of people. From politicians to clerks, it's people all the way down. Some people are good, most are just trying to get through the day, and some are evil. Seriously: in any government, some of the bureaucrats and politicians will be corrupt or power hungry or sadistic or whatever.
When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.
This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...
“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.
So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.
Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).
One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.
Right - this government has it's own problems, and Trump is of course entirely transactional so will be looking for something in return for rescinding this order (as he of course will).
But of course Anthropic has been lobbying hard for this, for government regulation, and finally they've (at least temporarily) got what they want. Maybe they are actually happy with the outcome, who knows. They get to IPO and all get rich, they get to sell current level models, and future development gets heavily regulated.
It was always going to happen anyway - just a matter of time. At some point (whether that is today is beside the point) AI/AGI will become powerful enough to have national security implications and of course the government is going to regulate who can have access or not, put in place export controls, require clearance for developers, etc.
I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.
Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.
However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.
Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.
Ah yes, so we should have corporations controlling it? Because they can't be corrupt or evil?
The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
not really, the problem here is not that the government is involved per se, but that there is practically no involvment at all as the government is directly controlled by a clique of businessmen
so instead of involvment proper there is leverage somebody tries to pass onto competitors
Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
I have been surprised how few people seem to gave taken the lesson from Trump that creating federal authority today empowers all future leaders.
Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.
Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.
Do you not see the difference between Trumpian dictator-level “involvement” and regular day-to-day steering of legislation in a party-friendly manner?
This is laughable “both parties are as bad” thinking. By reasonable standards your current government has gone through involvement, passed straight through tampering and is now into nation-destruction mode. It’s a new thing for the rest of the world to see.
> I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement!
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
It’s the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, “my team is good and your team is bad”. People scoff at things like WWE but it’s really no different if you have a “my team” in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, it’s still all “scripted”, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.
Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.
It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.
It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...
Whenever someone wants "small government" I assume they mean "a government that does not prevent me from shackling you" and hoo boy does that end up correct a lot.
There were certainly self-styled libertarians who were very keen on this particular US administration and its laissez-faire approach to rules, especially rules binding on the executive...
Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
It indeed is a wake up call. But at the same time the strong data protection laws, copyright and privacy laws make it extremely difficult for a European company to develop a frontier model. Activist lawyers can sue and drag startups for training their model on a news article and the legal expenses would be higher than the engineering costs.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals?
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
Disagree with the popular conclusions that this is either calculated anti-marketing or politically-motivated axe grinding. Both theories might carry some weight, but they belie the bigger picture. If you believe AI will be a determinant of economic growth, defense capacity, scientific advancement, and geopolitical supremacy over the next few decades, then state supervision/control was always inevitable. There's already precedent in nuclear tech, chip tech, aerospace tech, etc. In theory, the stakes here are 100x higher. USA and China will do whatever they can to get a competitive edge over the other. Meaning this is probably just the first salvo in an ongoing series of similar events. At the end of the day, I'm not sure any of it will matter. All signs point to the models being basically impossible to contain.
It’s not a question of regulate or not regulate. It’s whether it’s ok for the president to not like your company and screw with you.
It’s fun to point out all the Schadenfreude around Anthropic here. But that missed the dangerous precedent of the administration using export controls to punish political enemies.
Tech companies should see this as an existential threat. Not just point at Anthropic and laugh.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
Why would foreign (relative to the US) models suddenly sit still? There's enormous incentive to improve; surely they'll be able to figure out how just like their American counterparts?
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.
Even without those incentives, the messaging is clear: you don't want your inference to be shut arbitrarily. Export controls are nothing new but a lot of people have underestimated them due to globalization and the general nature of software. This is a good opportunity for entities around the world to get their setup going.
My theory is that this is about setting up a precedent for control, the "foreign" framing is especially revealing in this direction imo. Lots of countries are discussing "Sovereignty AI strategies" right now. The weird part for me is the 30 days retention change, if this was a calculated theatre, then what part did that play? Wondering if that was also an ask from the govt just not disclosed by them.
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
>This was announced on 5:21 PM on a Friday. Sorta a suspicious time. Whenever someone does something intentionally on a Friday evening, my first thought is ‘o, the markets.’
The insider trading kleptocrat has found a new toy
Markets were calm in after-hours trading. It's not as if there is nobody paying attention. That would be a massive inefficiency that couldn't realistically have persisted all the way to 2026, especially not with the introduction of AI to the trading world.
anthropic is a private company, so i'm not sure which market you mean. their shares probably trade on secondary markets in low volumes but it would be strange for them to make decisions based on that trading.
I'm surprised about that. I'm not up to speed on the current situation (though I did find this, which may be of interest[0][1]), last I heard was a few months ago when they stopped banning people for using 3rd party software on the subs and started charging extra usage for it instead.
In this case it's automating the official software, which was a grey area (e.g. claude -p). And is now apparently totally cool. Except seems to also be switching to extra usage on June 15th[0][1].
The ACP thing seems to be in the same category as claude -p, billing-wise, from what I gathered[2].
Chinese model companies are already beginning to close, instead of opening. The latest big Qwen models are not open, for example. And it doesn't look like they will be, either.
MiniMax and Moonshot both literally just released the weights for their latest flagship models, a few weeks after DeepSeek did the same. One lab a pattern does not make.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
I don't want to pile onto the conspiracy thinking but I was just wondering how Anthropic was going to foot the bill for the clearly larger and more expensive model being run on millions of Claude Code subscriptions, subsidized until the 22nd.
I thought for sure they'd turn it off sooner rather than later because the deadline would create a rush to get as much Fable usage as possible.
So, it would be logical to utilize any number of approaches to turn off usage...
It would be massively beneficial to Anthropic to have the government be the big baddie here. I'll withhold judgement until Fable comes back online - because it will. Will it come back online "unfortunately" just after the 22nd and, shucks, everyone will have to pay for token usage now?
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.
Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
Clearly Anthropic should have anticipated this and voluntarily banned all but native-born US citizens from using Fable from the outset. This would have had the benefit of preventing David Sacks from accessing the model and would have kept us all safer.
Sacks fraudulently obtained citizenship papers but the next administration will likely review the case and revoke his citizenship, which will make him eligible for deportation.
Sacks can choose to self-deport on his own, which will help his chances if he ever decides to re-apply for citizenship or entry into the US.
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
the bigger point i think stands - we're going to have a similar story with AI as for example the 40-bit encryption of the past and drones of today, i.e. sure export controlled and most probably regulated practically away for general public. I.e general license to possess/access 8B model max, and maximum 3 models summing to max 16B in total.
Yes. Very much feels like the encryption story indeed. This is very normal in many industries. Explosives, space, chemicals etc.
The difference is that still the bio and space hackers are few and SWE are plenty so there is more of a collective voice.
I’d love to build a hobbyist space rocket. However, many tools and fuels required per my research can’t be obtained outside the US. So I didn’t even start.
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
I think we should consider them unsafe when they show themselves to be unsafe. So far…nothing. Just like with the hype of businesses automating away their workforce. Nothing.
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
Lots of sophistry here. Trump’s reputation as a 1st class negotiator is the lens through which to understand.
This is simultaneously many things and it’s best to view them as a negotiated package:
- No foreign nationals: not subject to US law (locality notwithstanding) -> bolsters America First which is the primary role of the government, accountability to its citizens
- Part of a US citizen AI dividend (not cash but access). Yes Nationals are not always citizens but that’s just why it’s defensible bc it bolsters the former under the guise of the DoD’s purview on the latter. Primary point here is leverage. Nationals can have their visas revoked.
- Semi-legit defense concern that bypasses regulation: stays in the executive, no 5y drawn out deliberations by congressional committees where many are clearly influenced by foreign interests (logistically Trump would be a fool to pursue the latter over the former)
- Anthropic receives the greatest marketing stamp of approval in AI history (the DoD fears the power of what we’ve created)
- Anthropic avoids truly punitive government action. FAFO. Not defending the govt here, but Trump has done nothing historically novel here.
- Within the next month or probably the next week (save this post), Anthropic reenables Fable access gated by drivers license verification (no fly lists will exist, which we effectively surrendered awhile ago, legality notwithstanding)
- Anthropic IPOs with the only DoD grade model (OpenAI doesn’t have this, yet) & firmly acquiesces as an American company first and foremost
- America firmly establishes itself as the AI world leader (both PR wise and going forward from a gating perspective).
- Corporations will nationalize for access, taxes will flow, AI dividends will flourish
- Both Trump & Anthropic will come out looking like titans battling and winning their own respective victories and it’s all pre-negotiated theater (Anthropic’s hand will have been coerced but not forced. They will come out ahead, US govt maintains is legal supremacy, Anthropic maintains its technical supremacy, this is the repeated lens from which all of this has flowed going back at least the last year, probably much longer)
Everyone comes out looking awesome in the long run. The only matter in which they look bad is through the lens of public opinion, not in real measurable outcomes. This is PR laundering with real existential stakes for both parties.
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
Dark times like the end of personal computing, regulatory capture, powerful AI models and computers that can run them becoming something only a special class of people can have, further concentration of wealth and power into corporations and governments.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.
I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.
Did you think 5 years into the invention of electricity the world already was vastly different? The internet? Would you have written them off because random people didn't know much about them at that point - which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
You think machine learning has only been around for 5 years? It has been around for 76 years, since 1950. The first pattern matching chatbot was Eliza, created in 1966. Shannon-style next-word statistical model chatbots were created in the 1980s. The first neural models were created 26 years ago. Large language models have been around for 10 years.
This technology is not new and has been around since well before the internet.
I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
OTOH, maybe Dario is colluding with some people the US government to drum up some PR before the IPO? "OoOoo these models are so scarily good, export controls were forced onto them"
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.
> run a ton of agents in parallel most of the time
What makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
My bet is working through an abstraction layer (LLMs) will make crafting a fun game more difficult. The art of designing a (great) game is in the details. English is not sufficient to communicate the individual strokes of a brush on canvas.
Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.
For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me.
I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.
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You have to have the models the create tools for you to paint.
I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.
I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.
So I told Codex:
- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)
- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh
- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need
- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things
And I got my desired look within a few seconds.
The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
> Over time the gems will rise to the top
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
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> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer
That has been true even without AI.
Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.
Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.
Programming is the easiest part of game dev.
Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.
So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.
A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
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Strong AI enthusiasm like on there and poor taste tend to correlate pretty strongly. I'm sure there are lots of developers using LLMs to assist with the boring work of coding and keeping mostly quiet about it, still keeping it on a short lead & doing the more creative parts themselves. There have always been indie developers who hate coding and see it as just a necessary step to get their idea out the door, and they still make good games. All the dialogue in Undertale is implemented in a giant 5k+LOC switch statement.
Yeah I’ve been working on a game just for my kids, it convinced me to upgrade to Codex Pro and I absolutely wouldn’t release it to anyone until I felt 100% it actually was fun to play. It’s easy to get stuck not doing the stuff that can’t be automated. The crazy thing is that making the game pretty good looking (like Nintendo Switch level graphics) is basically trivial now and can be largely automated, maybe with a little Blender cleanup for your most important assets. That doesn’t make a game fun though.
Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.
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On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.
Indie dev here. Making games is hard it is one of the few spots in software where all disciples have to come together to make something compelling.
I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.
It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.
Making games is hard for the greatest game designers and programmers of all time.
We have had any number of quite competently programmed absolute flops.
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
It is like writing novels: it is not the spelling or typing on the keyboard that is the bottleneck.
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.
Let LLMs help you with coding. Design the game and the mechanics yourself. I can see this being an incredibly empowering tool in the right game developer's hands; but if you come into it with a token-maxxing / AI-maxxing mentality, I doubt you'll make a fun game to play.
Well I've enjoyed making little "flash" like games with AI. I have a SKILL.md for how to build out a pico8 game that it updates when it finishes a game.
I give it an rough idea, or none and have it make a game.
See if there something here you enjoy to convince you I do think AI can slowly as they improve make more variety of lightweight 15 minute games.
https://4rc4de.com
Speaking of game explorations/ideas enabled by LLMs, here is a 'craft anything' sandbox I'm trying to turn into a game: https://asciidia.com
I'm glad someone finally mentioned this. These are cute little interactive demos, not games. It has made me appreciate real game design much more.
I ran into this wall too. Someone here on HN said their general test is “make a browser only simple rts game with no AI and no multiplayer” What makes a game fun is very different than the engine of a game. My kid asked me to make a game where you brew potions. Okay, done. Adding ingredients, having physics to drop the items rather than “okay they just appear in the pot” (or worse it just says “okay they’re in there!”) Especially for kids there’s a physicality you have to capture to make it both fun and understandable to a seven year old.
Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.
There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”
Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).
The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.
Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.
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>> And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code.
But those games have already been designed a specific way, based on the developer's ideas and imagination and vision.
If you're the sort of person who always thinks along the lines of "I wish there was a way to upgrade spells" or "it would be great if you could open this door and see what is behind it" or "I hate the way orcs and goblins are friends, they should actually fight each other"
That has always been the issue with games: they capture the imagination... and then stop there. There's no way to expand them the way you want (except for submitting requests/wishes to the devs and hope they listen and add it in a short enough time period) and customization options are always very limited.
AI, on the other hand, empowers everyone to bring their own ideas to life. Sure, those ideas may not be great, or the execution may not be great, but at the end of the day it's a way to express one's imagination that would otherwise take years to do.
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
This is very reminiscent of the NSA's attempt to limit crypto access of websites in the 90s. We were very close to having the U.S. ban SSL right when it was becoming the clear solution for safe open web transfers for payments.
I assume only the weight of economic pressure and lack of alternatives (and plenty of opposition) kept the doors open, but the same "national interest and security" BS was trotted out then, too.
Big difference this time is nobody needs Fable/Mythos to accomplish anything. There is no magic line here, only improved connective work with less intervention. But it stands to reason that this will cause a huge chilling effect on AI development in the U.S. if it stands and other labs will eventually bypass Fable/Mythos in capability.
To use a car analogy, the models are being built like engine improvements, sometimes going from V6 to V8, but other orgs might improve the car's wind resistance or fuel injection, which leads to a similar speed improvements. There is a lot of space for improvements all along the chain which is why this is such a pointless move.
Knowing this administration (and Anthropic's ham-fisted tactics) this ends in a week or less with some sort of "deal" and was all part of some high stakes negotiation. Possibly even beneficial to Anthropic, because where does it leave OpenAI once they settle on some sweetheart deal? The precedent is set.
Lots of people on HN, and lots of chronic forum users, think that being skeptical/bitter/cynical makes them sound smarter.
Most nerds (like myself) outgrew this edgy mentality in highschool/college. Realistically this mentality just makes it impossible to see anything except through the darkest possible lens.
This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.
If the price to pay is total human disempowerment, I think it's worth getting everyone on the same page before we proceed.
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Right, but the widespread literacy took generations to take hold. But, the threat was immediate.
I think, in the long run, of course AI is a boon. But I’m not immortal, and right now it’s a threat to all our livelihoods. We should put ourselves first, and be selfish, while we’re still alive to be selfish.
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> Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation
The Claude.ai web prompt has an undismissable "Claude Fable 5 is current unavailable" notice.
I'm not saying it's 100% a stunt.
But...Anthropic really wants you to know about it.
And if they didn't have this all of HN would rant about how they aren't even telling you that their best model is unavailable, despite having a subscription.
If they tell you, it's a marketing stunt; if they don't, they're being deceptive.
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I fully agree and this other side of excessive scepticism people are ruining it for everyone else. They are a big distraction. They keep saying things like:
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
>This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us.
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
The state is the farmer, and we are the cows.
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This is so true, if anyone posts any positive aspect of AI, those comments are downvoted to abyss. As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety and saying AI is evil and must be stopped is so selfish when AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
What’s so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
> As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?
Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
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>these very incredibly smart
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
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I'll believe it when I see it.
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OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card.
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
Maybe because Dario was actually reasoning through potential risks, rather than blindly thinking everything will be okay?
Thinking GPT2 was too dangerous is and was absurd.
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All that happened was announcing said potential risks and then continuing to launch and push and release it anyways. Something that Anthropic continues to do under his leadership.
Google also analyzed for risks earlier in development of "Meena" and "Bard" and chose not to release, instead. And then got caught flatfooted when OpenAI did so anyways. (They also I think didn't really see a compelling business case for public propagation of it, either).
It starts to look very much like what is really happening with Anthropic is a lot of cynical attempts at regulatory capture. Make grand proclamations. Get your stuff out there first. Ask for regulation and then kick the ladder away from underneath you. But they did it clumsily and failed to grease the right palms.
I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they?
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
> These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the “deep fakes (opens in a new window)” phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.
These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
> The public at large will need to
Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
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To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
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AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.
With ai I can get government bodies to do their job. Escalate and make formal complaints until it’s done. Manually would take ages to find the right law and draft a proper complaint.
AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
Dario's brain child
"Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors have friends up and down the administration — the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that it’s no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
A requirement of digital sovereignty is the ability to build competitive digital companies. It seems unlikely to me at this point that the EU is going to turn that ship around.
This is the time for the EU to offer favorable terms to Anthropic and deferred regulation. Give 'em an escape hatch.
> 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'.
Given everything else this administration has done, you now decide to accept their stated intentions at face value?
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
This kills the entire enterprise market for AI models better than Opus 4.8
1) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician.
2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee of each and every enterprise customer in order to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
This is the first impression I got, a glass ceiling on AI that will hit the market hard. Timing was right at the late Friday's let's-avoid-the-crash point, we'll see how this flies on Monday.
But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.
Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!
And what if the US government does the same for Opus or other models? No model is safe from being banned that way
For American AI models better than Opus 4.8.
The much-decried EU AI Act provides a safe, predictable regulatory framework to base ones AI development on. It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.
If AI companies have any sort of sense in them, they'd be well-advised to consider relocating to Europe.
> It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.
I don't think assuming the European commission will act rationally or stably on this is really a good idea, and I say that as a European...
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> If AI companies have any sort of sense in them, they'd be well-advised to consider relocating to Europe.
Too late now. They wouldn't be allowed to relocate in the name of national security.
The EU AI Act killed Mistral. It's not a stable or reasonable base.
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I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
>I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic
Pretty wild statement given the "Pathological liar" chat around the OAI leader
You can infer a pathological liar's true intentions from the incentives they find themselves subject to, but not a zealot's.
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You didn't even need to read between the lines, that was basically what the CEO stated point blank in interviews and in his writing.
(I noted the same thing a few weeks back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341224 but his recent blogposts should make it crystal clear if there was any lingering doubt).
If you’ve seen what people will do for $500 it seems impossible to trust people you don’t know, at all, who have multi million let alone billion dollar incentives.
Have you seen what people do to their own family members over inheritances? You “trust” OpenAI?
“Who's being naive, Kay?” - God Father
> Some people over on HN and Reddit are already talking about how this represents the high water mark for what the government will ‘allow’ people to access. You can have all the demand in the world, and it won’t matter a lick if the government just won’t let you have it.
Black market LLMs are straight out of a William Gibson story.
Welcome to Hacker News
Thanks! I've really enjoyed my first sixteen years here!
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
Having used and watched others use Fable, it's clear to me that the standard of care for these models done by Anthropic pre-release was nothing like their previous releases. It seemed like shortcuts were taken to get it released. Maybe the models are changing faster than their team can adapt, and maybe the government responded as quickly as they did because of their relationship with Anthropic. Regardless, I think regulation was appropriate here. Anthropic can take the time to refine and improve their internal models to have a more successful release next time. It is normal for the government to restrict potentially dangerous companies if the level of care seems below what is acceptable in the US. We've seen it a lot recently with FAA grounding rocket companies. I don't feel it is cruel treatment just cause it's Anthropic
How was this release more rushed than previous ones?
I have the opposite impression using Fable, behavior-wise it is much more polished than Opus 4.7 was at launch.
Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
> If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
That's not what's going on. But, what's going on has always been possible. Even to this day, there's software that's is subject to export controls. There's also an often-changing list of countries that US-based companies are prohibited from doing any business with. For software, this has been going on since the 1990s. "Weirdly", the US-based software business has been doing really well.
Anthropic was instructed to prevent Foreign Nationals from using a subset of their software. Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.
Anthropic had other options. One of those options was to gate access to the software behind the ID, biometrics, and -if present- passport capture that Big Tech seems to be very excited to do. I expect that -if they end up changing anything at all about access control- we'll see them doing something very similar to that in the coming weeks.
>Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.
>Anthropic had other options.
Well, not exactly. They weren't given prior notice and a deadline to comply. That was really the only option to comply with the order. However, things may change in the future
> But this government [...]
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
We're truly lost when we can't see that there is such a thing as good government and bad government. That there is a difference between corruption and modern liberal regulation that follows fair rules. That we can't see that it's ok to regulate CFCs to prevent ozone catastrophe, and not ok to use back room deals to pick favorites. It's not about sides or teams, but there is still right and wrong even in the administration of nation states. And we fluctuate along a gradient with our governments, sometimes its better, sometimes its worse, never perfect, but sometimes much better.
I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government. They just disagree about which one is the good one and which is the bad one.
The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.
A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.
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Alas I suspect the two major forms of government in the US have their own visions of good and bad across the board when there should be no disagreement on issues like CFCs were bad and that we need to break our addiction to coal. But good luck on that when the system itself only rewards short-term achievements and private money is now effectively unlimited. I have issues with both options, but many more issues with one side. But I am fed up with having only two options and picking the lesser of two evils that mostly drop their differences to keep the electoral status quo intact.
You are correct: there is a right and wrong. Rights are actions which do not initiate harm in the form of murder, assault, rape, theft, trespass, coercion, or deception. Wrong actions are the initiation of harm. What is truly lost is the ability to assess on first principles. You are afraid of an outcome, and think "good government" is going to protect you from that risk. A better master who will gaurd you instead of whip you is your end point. It is actually reflective of your character.
We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined.
Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".
> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).
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This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.
Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.
By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).
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I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.
You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).
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Avoid walls when walking in hallways.
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
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I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
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Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
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> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
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>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.
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Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
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“Advertising” vs “doing”
"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.
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Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
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> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial
One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".
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>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
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You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
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I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
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This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
Agreed. It feels intellectually childish to say we can never have any government because of corruption. This government is flagrantly corrupt, has publicly ignored the courts, and weaponized the DOJ. This is not normal.
I’m pretty certain that most of my issues are with a specific kind of government, not with government in general.
Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
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But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.
You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.
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Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.
You say it, but you don't always get it.
Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.
There's currently no real democracy on earth.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
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US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
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This. There really is no such thing as an entirely good government. Government is composed of people. From politicians to clerks, it's people all the way down. Some people are good, most are just trying to get through the day, and some are evil. Seriously: in any government, some of the bureaucrats and politicians will be corrupt or power hungry or sadistic or whatever.
When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.
This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...
I'm curious if you apply the same logic to speculation markets and corporate profits.
It’s actually ok to be more critical of a government that’s capricious than one that merely advances polices one disagrees with
Of course the tired follow-up: “But if the government was functioning properly it would only do the things I want”.
And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".
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Mmm. Same argument for any seat of power though.
“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.
So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.
Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).
One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.
I agree with the point, but I think it's fair to acknowledge that the current US government is not a "normal" one in any sense.
Right - this government has it's own problems, and Trump is of course entirely transactional so will be looking for something in return for rescinding this order (as he of course will).
But of course Anthropic has been lobbying hard for this, for government regulation, and finally they've (at least temporarily) got what they want. Maybe they are actually happy with the outcome, who knows. They get to IPO and all get rich, they get to sell current level models, and future development gets heavily regulated.
It was always going to happen anyway - just a matter of time. At some point (whether that is today is beside the point) AI/AGI will become powerful enough to have national security implications and of course the government is going to regulate who can have access or not, put in place export controls, require clearance for developers, etc.
That’s a strange argument. If my postman shits in my letterbox, is that proof that the whole concept of postmen is a bad idea?
Each government just adds shit on the previous, with small optics differences, anyway.
Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.
ICE does a lot of objectionable things no matter what you think about deporting illegals
Great, so nihilism
>it's the real lesson that should be learned here
I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.
Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.
However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.
Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.
Ah yes, so we should have corporations controlling it? Because they can't be corrupt or evil?
The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
> where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment
Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?
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Agreed.
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
> I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted.
I've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/
If no government ever got involved we would all be slaves to a family of inbred kings.
not really, the problem here is not that the government is involved per se, but that there is practically no involvment at all as the government is directly controlled by a clique of businessmen
so instead of involvment proper there is leverage somebody tries to pass onto competitors
Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
I have been surprised how few people seem to gave taken the lesson from Trump that creating federal authority today empowers all future leaders.
Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.
Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.
Do you not see the difference between Trumpian dictator-level “involvement” and regular day-to-day steering of legislation in a party-friendly manner?
This is laughable “both parties are as bad” thinking. By reasonable standards your current government has gone through involvement, passed straight through tampering and is now into nation-destruction mode. It’s a new thing for the rest of the world to see.
> I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement!
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
It’s the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, “my team is good and your team is bad”. People scoff at things like WWE but it’s really no different if you have a “my team” in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, it’s still all “scripted”, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.
Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.
It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.
It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...
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I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...
Whenever someone wants "small government" I assume they mean "a government that does not prevent me from shackling you" and hoo boy does that end up correct a lot.
There were certainly self-styled libertarians who were very keen on this particular US administration and its laissez-faire approach to rules, especially rules binding on the executive...
Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
This should be a red herring for Europe (and others using US models).
Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.
It indeed is a wake up call. But at the same time the strong data protection laws, copyright and privacy laws make it extremely difficult for a European company to develop a frontier model. Activist lawyers can sue and drag startups for training their model on a news article and the legal expenses would be higher than the engineering costs.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
As we learned with export restrictions on crypto in the 90s, that disadvantage will be short-lived and backfire in the long-run.
It's like, the 10th wake up call at this point
Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals?
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
The US can create sanctions with legal repercussions, the same way they've done with Iran or Cuba in the past.
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What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
xAI or OpenAI? (Or both?)
XAI rents out compute to anthropic. I feel like Sam Altman is behind this that little rat.
Considering he cornered future production of DRAM, I believe it!
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What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
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Potentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050
Disagree with the popular conclusions that this is either calculated anti-marketing or politically-motivated axe grinding. Both theories might carry some weight, but they belie the bigger picture. If you believe AI will be a determinant of economic growth, defense capacity, scientific advancement, and geopolitical supremacy over the next few decades, then state supervision/control was always inevitable. There's already precedent in nuclear tech, chip tech, aerospace tech, etc. In theory, the stakes here are 100x higher. USA and China will do whatever they can to get a competitive edge over the other. Meaning this is probably just the first salvo in an ongoing series of similar events. At the end of the day, I'm not sure any of it will matter. All signs point to the models being basically impossible to contain.
I guess it will be interesting if, in a week or two, OpenAI launches a "Fable class" model and it isn't blocked by the government.
The problem is it’s arbitrary executive action
It’s not a question of regulate or not regulate. It’s whether it’s ok for the president to not like your company and screw with you.
It’s fun to point out all the Schadenfreude around Anthropic here. But that missed the dangerous precedent of the administration using export controls to punish political enemies.
Tech companies should see this as an existential threat. Not just point at Anthropic and laugh.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
Why would foreign (relative to the US) models suddenly sit still? There's enormous incentive to improve; surely they'll be able to figure out how just like their American counterparts?
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.
The US will try to ban them, for being too dangerous or for being an IP violation[0] of some companies we've deemed too big to fail.
[0] lmao how ironic
Even without those incentives, the messaging is clear: you don't want your inference to be shut arbitrarily. Export controls are nothing new but a lot of people have underestimated them due to globalization and the general nature of software. This is a good opportunity for entities around the world to get their setup going.
My theory is that this is about setting up a precedent for control, the "foreign" framing is especially revealing in this direction imo. Lots of countries are discussing "Sovereignty AI strategies" right now. The weird part for me is the 30 days retention change, if this was a calculated theatre, then what part did that play? Wondering if that was also an ask from the govt just not disclosed by them.
https://archive.ph/ERGwR
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...
Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
You will miss the good old Europe that only regulated.
this is my take, I hope Brussels has people on the dialer from 6am today. mistral needs 50B euros pronto
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
This is an extremely low quality, profanity-laden, ideologically compromised whinefest, and it doesn't belong on Hacker News.
>This was announced on 5:21 PM on a Friday. Sorta a suspicious time. Whenever someone does something intentionally on a Friday evening, my first thought is ‘o, the markets.’
The insider trading kleptocrat has found a new toy
Markets were calm in after-hours trading. It's not as if there is nobody paying attention. That would be a massive inefficiency that couldn't realistically have persisted all the way to 2026, especially not with the introduction of AI to the trading world.
anthropic is a private company, so i'm not sure which market you mean. their shares probably trade on secondary markets in low volumes but it would be strange for them to make decisions based on that trading.
>custom harness
Means you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)
Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.
No, we use subscriptions. We wrap the underlying Claude Code with ACP. See: https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-cli
Thanks, TIL.
I'm surprised about that. I'm not up to speed on the current situation (though I did find this, which may be of interest[0][1]), last I heard was a few months ago when they stopped banning people for using 3rd party software on the subs and started charging extra usage for it instead.
In this case it's automating the official software, which was a grey area (e.g. claude -p). And is now apparently totally cool. Except seems to also be switching to extra usage on June 15th[0][1].
The ACP thing seems to be in the same category as claude -p, billing-wise, from what I gathered[2].
[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
[1] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317625/20260602/anthropic...
[2] https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/anthropic-claude-credit-...
Correct on Enterprise. Teams has a 150 user cap.
On Enterprise you might end up saving money if the other harness is more efficient.
Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
Chinese model companies are already beginning to close, instead of opening. The latest big Qwen models are not open, for example. And it doesn't look like they will be, either.
MiniMax and Moonshot both literally just released the weights for their latest flagship models, a few weeks after DeepSeek did the same. One lab a pattern does not make.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
I suspect it will lead to less open sourcing but at the same time that will drive on premise deployment demand from enterprises.
If that happens, presumably the weights eventually make their way online...
By all indications, Fable is way too big to feasibly host locally. Even Opus is probably near enough to the limit.
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
I don't want to pile onto the conspiracy thinking but I was just wondering how Anthropic was going to foot the bill for the clearly larger and more expensive model being run on millions of Claude Code subscriptions, subsidized until the 22nd.
I thought for sure they'd turn it off sooner rather than later because the deadline would create a rush to get as much Fable usage as possible.
So, it would be logical to utilize any number of approaches to turn off usage...
It would be massively beneficial to Anthropic to have the government be the big baddie here. I'll withhold judgement until Fable comes back online - because it will. Will it come back online "unfortunately" just after the 22nd and, shucks, everyone will have to pay for token usage now?
This is why we must diversify our technology stack back to the 80's style of computing heterogeneity.
A summary of HN comments, posted on HN to generate even more comments. Very meta.
Hopefully compiled, analyzed, and written with AI
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.
Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
Clearly Anthropic should have anticipated this and voluntarily banned all but native-born US citizens from using Fable from the outset. This would have had the benefit of preventing David Sacks from accessing the model and would have kept us all safer.
To be clear, the restriction is not to native-born citizens of the US but citizens of the US in general. David Sacks is a US citizen.
Sacks fraudulently obtained citizenship papers but the next administration will likely review the case and revoke his citizenship, which will make him eligible for deportation.
Sacks can choose to self-deport on his own, which will help his chances if he ever decides to re-apply for citizenship or entry into the US.
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That wouldn't have helped, the US government would still ban the model
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
the bigger point i think stands - we're going to have a similar story with AI as for example the 40-bit encryption of the past and drones of today, i.e. sure export controlled and most probably regulated practically away for general public. I.e general license to possess/access 8B model max, and maximum 3 models summing to max 16B in total.
Yes. Very much feels like the encryption story indeed. This is very normal in many industries. Explosives, space, chemicals etc.
The difference is that still the bio and space hackers are few and SWE are plenty so there is more of a collective voice.
I’d love to build a hobbyist space rocket. However, many tools and fuels required per my research can’t be obtained outside the US. So I didn’t even start.
>I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible.
Such as?
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
The post talks about this kind of rhetoric
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
I think we should consider them unsafe when they show themselves to be unsafe. So far…nothing. Just like with the hype of businesses automating away their workforce. Nothing.
Maybe you have evidence otherwise?
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I just call it Flaky 5. Only works sometimes. Or not at all
trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
But it already is.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
> The world is a bit bigger than US and China
With respect to AI capabilities is it really?
I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.
Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too
Mistral in the EU, for one.
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>The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b
Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.
I'm looking forward to Opus 4.9
It turned out Amazon are the snitchers on anthropic after all
Edit: if anthropic couldn’t resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)
Next up, you must login to ID.me to use AI and providers will be required to retain every session for analysis.
this will end up helping Antropic
While I agree with much of this, the author seems to continually ignore one little detail: Fable was cut off for foreign nationals, not for everyone.
Occam's Razor. This is more about a vindictive government, than the model capabilities.
And, on other side of coin, it is more great publicity.
Oh, so that's why. Well, at least it managed to finish most of the work on one of my pet projects yesterday. :)
Looks like the weekly limits again reset prematurely during this change. Interesting how this works.
But why depend and rely on AI?
There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
Lots of sophistry here. Trump’s reputation as a 1st class negotiator is the lens through which to understand.
This is simultaneously many things and it’s best to view them as a negotiated package:
- No foreign nationals: not subject to US law (locality notwithstanding) -> bolsters America First which is the primary role of the government, accountability to its citizens
- Part of a US citizen AI dividend (not cash but access). Yes Nationals are not always citizens but that’s just why it’s defensible bc it bolsters the former under the guise of the DoD’s purview on the latter. Primary point here is leverage. Nationals can have their visas revoked.
- Semi-legit defense concern that bypasses regulation: stays in the executive, no 5y drawn out deliberations by congressional committees where many are clearly influenced by foreign interests (logistically Trump would be a fool to pursue the latter over the former)
- Anthropic receives the greatest marketing stamp of approval in AI history (the DoD fears the power of what we’ve created)
- Anthropic avoids truly punitive government action. FAFO. Not defending the govt here, but Trump has done nothing historically novel here.
- Within the next month or probably the next week (save this post), Anthropic reenables Fable access gated by drivers license verification (no fly lists will exist, which we effectively surrendered awhile ago, legality notwithstanding)
- Anthropic IPOs with the only DoD grade model (OpenAI doesn’t have this, yet) & firmly acquiesces as an American company first and foremost
- America firmly establishes itself as the AI world leader (both PR wise and going forward from a gating perspective).
- Corporations will nationalize for access, taxes will flow, AI dividends will flourish
- Both Trump & Anthropic will come out looking like titans battling and winning their own respective victories and it’s all pre-negotiated theater (Anthropic’s hand will have been coerced but not forced. They will come out ahead, US govt maintains is legal supremacy, Anthropic maintains its technical supremacy, this is the repeated lens from which all of this has flowed going back at least the last year, probably much longer)
Everyone comes out looking awesome in the long run. The only matter in which they look bad is through the lens of public opinion, not in real measurable outcomes. This is PR laundering with real existential stakes for both parties.
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
Dark times like:
- Staying alive
- Keeping our jobs
?
Dark times like the end of personal computing, regulatory capture, powerful AI models and computers that can run them becoming something only a special class of people can have, further concentration of wealth and power into corporations and governments.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.
I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
Ask a recent college grad if the world is drastically different today then when they started college.
If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.
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Did you think 5 years into the invention of electricity the world already was vastly different? The internet? Would you have written them off because random people didn't know much about them at that point - which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
> which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.
You think machine learning has only been around for 5 years? It has been around for 76 years, since 1950. The first pattern matching chatbot was Eliza, created in 1966. Shannon-style next-word statistical model chatbots were created in the 1980s. The first neural models were created 26 years ago. Large language models have been around for 10 years.
This technology is not new and has been around since well before the internet.
I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
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If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
Yet another bitchfest about "the current administration", i.e., Donald Trump.
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lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
> it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
The Mythos marketing strategy in action
Of course it is, the USA is under the control of a petty toddler that demands absolute loyalty, not to the country, but him personally.
OTOH, maybe Dario is colluding with some people the US government to drum up some PR before the IPO? "OoOoo these models are so scarily good, export controls were forced onto them"
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.
I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
> run a ton of agents in parallel most of the time
What makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".