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Comment by himata4113

5 days ago

I think this is as good as time as any to bring up that fable/mythos weights are one mistake (malicious or not) away from being leaked to adverseries or available in a random torrent.

Imagine this, fable weights are likely distributed to hundreds of datacenters with likely thousands of people directly or indirectly having partial or full access. I just don't quite buy that a 'world ending' fable/mythos model would be treated like this, mythos I could maybe believe that it runs inside government compliant datacenters which have a proven track record, but something as valuable as a 'world ending' model invites state sponsored actors to put in significantly more effort into exfiltrating it.

Whatever the real story is I doubt this is as ground-breaking as anthropic claims it to be.

We've been told models are too dangerous since gpt2.

There comes a point where you not only want the boy to stop crying wolf, but hopefully be eaten by one.

  • That example is brought up a lot, but in retrospect the concerns about Gpt2 were pretty valid: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dang...

    >OpenAI said its new natural language model, GPT-2, was trained to predict the next word in a sample of 40 gigabytes of internet text. The end result was the system generating text that “adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text,” allowing the user to “generate realistic and coherent continuations about a topic of their choosing.” The model is a vast improvement on the first version by producing longer text with greater coherence.

    >But with every good application of the system, such as bots capable of better dialog and better speech recognition, the non-profit found several more, like generating fake news, impersonating people, or automating abusive or spam comments on social media.

    • Does OpenAI suspend users that they detect impersonating people, spamming people or generating social media posts though? It feels like they belled the cat just to charge a toll for abusive usage, and now that we've seen LLMs used for real warfare, the moralist angle isn't very defensible. OpenAI and Anthropic are both willing to help kill people if the price is right.

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    • > or automating abusive or spam comments on social media.

      Actually, the biggest problem is the automation of inane comments on X. Which is admittedly quite surprising - I would have agreed with OpenAI at the time.

  • I don’t fully agree with this sentiment. Just because we were told something and it didn’t come true before, it doesn’t mean it can’t come true now, and that the capabilities are there now.

    At this point we have enough of real evidence from project glasswing like the massive Firefox security patches from Mythos findings. This isn’t crying wolf.

    I’m very glad that they’re actually being grownups and not yolo’ing something this important, and are working with groups until we can secure critical infrastructure before making this more available.

  • And Guinness thought the t-test was too dangerous to announce publicly over a century ago

    • I don't get the analogy.

      Guinness didn't want to make it public because he was afraid competition would start using it, and then lose his company's advantage.

      In the current context, the retention didn't happen because of Anthropic. On the contrary, the company wanted to offer Mythos/Fable.

    • I think that is a little bit disingenuous, Guinness just saw it as a trade secret. Not something that was too dangerous to release to the public for the public's own 'good', just that it could be bad for their business.

Mythos somehow leaking and becoming usable by all humanity in a self-hosted manner would probably be the optimal long term outcome.

  • Just wait patiently for the chinese labs to inevitably distill Fable without the 'policy layer/neurons' and offer it for pennies.

    That one will be fun to see.

    • Sounds awesome. I can barely use Fable because or Anthropic's obnoxious fearmongering. It almost always gets downgraded to Opus 4.8. If the chinese somehow distill it into an open weight model, then I'll finally be able to harden my projects and networks.

  • We can’t buy affordable memory for Fortnite but everyone is running Mythos locally? Is this the year of Linux on the desktop too?

    • It's time for this bubble to pop already. We need to get past this centralized, unsustainable, undesirable, Big Brother stage of AI and get on to the "AI hosted in your kitchen" phase before we mess up the balance of power too much and effectively backdoor the US constitution to power hungry technocrats.

i believe it's more complicated than that. i know that nvidia offers TEE for their overpriced offerings. i would assume they make use of that so the weights are encrypted.

this doesn't mean it cannot leak but it would be a major undertaking.

this is why anthropic isn't that worried about having Elon service their models. the workflow would be something like handshaking with the nvidia TEE, provisioning it with your keys and then uploading encrypted weights. there is probably also a timer in there so you can't continue operating the nvidia box with the stolen weights without a heartbeat signal.

Im of the opinion it’s all marketing and the government has continually shown themselves to be insider traders.

I don't think Anthropic is claiming it's world ending? Just that it has offensive cybersecurity abilities which can be dangerous

Security has always been and always will be a game of cat and mouse.

We all need cyborg cats to hunt cyborg mice. There's no other compromise unless you want a rat infestation.

Is the model structure going to be easy to reverse engineer just from the weights? Also, I'm going to guess it's an MoE and thus it's possible there's no single machine that hosts all of Fabel / Mythos.

  • kvcache residency requirements and general latency for good throughput wants good locality, but you're right it could be split across multiple different parts of a single datacenter, but as I mentioned before the weakest link is before the model is ever loaded onto the gpus.

    as for reverse engineering I doubt it's something that state sponsored actors would struggle with for too long.

Remember the Clipper Chip back in 1993 because personal computing was considered too dangerous a technologie to be accesible un-controlled/suprvised to the general public?

Most likely it'll try to rewrite the whole world's CSS and get the custom properties wrong.

Yeah, and I also don't buy the semi-conspiratorial beliefs of some of my friends who think there is super intelligence somewhere being built.

If fable is the best we got everybody still has some more time till the apocalypse I think.

most of it is overstated because of marketing. in fact the ban looked like an inside job by the current administration to play with the stock value. if the ban did anything it was to make every n00b agree that Anthropic was so far ahead of its times it needed to be banned.

  • I feel like I'm loosing my mind with the way people are falling for the marketing with every iteration. Is it better, sure but it's still just a LLM.

  • Stock value?

    • Not publicly traded as they haven't IPOd yet (the part where those closely held shares become publicly traded), but Anthropic does absolutely have shares, and there is a valuation on those shares. I don't quite understand how the administration is playing this, beyond the normal corrupt protection racket stuff they're doing all the time now, but Dario is absolutely gearing every public apocalyptic prediction on juicing the "stock".

      I mean, if the matryoshka doll rent-a-gpu farce that is SpaceX somehow is worth $2T with their garbage child porn xAI, Anthropic must be worth quadzillions.