Comment by z4y5f3

This is a coherent explanation for why federal model censorship has started with cyber capabilities. But this GLM model release is an in-your-face challenge to that policy. They now have to either set models free or impose a censorship regime that will put anyone not under it at an advantage. Or muddle along in the middle as usual.

Then "security through secrecy" is really bad mantra especially in the age of AI: others will find the same zero days very soon. If they attack you, then this loses the whole plot. If they propose a fix, then your arsenal becomes smaller.

“Company hypes own product, downplays competitors” is still a thing with AI

> This makes perfect sense, but that conflicts with the impression put forward by Anthropic and OpenAI (in particular) that they alone occupy 'frontier model' spots.

Not necessarily. Even near the frontier, we don't really have a total ordering of capabilities, but a partial order. And even frontier models make plenty of mistakes. Combined with the randomness inherent in searching large codebases for vulnerabilities or correctness issues, it is entirely plausible that even much weaker models (and GLM-5.2 isn't even weak) can stumble upon issues that stronger models missed.

My current hypothesis – for which I have only limited evidence, unfortunately – is that it is better to have multiple reasonably powerful (but not necessarily frontier) models looking for issues than just one very powerful one. And even then you're likely to miss out on some issues.

Fable 5 is just over two months old.

For normal software it would be as you say, but LLM progress is so ridiculously fast that things go from "bleeding edge" to "eh, you'll do" in about that timeframe, and "eh, you'll do" to "why even bother with this old rubbish?" in the same again.

Or, from a different perspective, we can expect some new frontier model from Anthropic in a week or two, and from OpenAI in a month or so.

Anyone who knows anything realises banning things is a) impossible and b) your enemies will use them anyway, you are just depriving your own side of the advantages.

I don't think this really works because the Chinese government is going to be incentivised to tip off the US companies to deny the US government those exploits. I guess maybe that's what the open source patch program here is about, making sure banning the models doesn't work because they can just report the exploits without the company running the model themselves.

How does banning the models in the US prevent this?

Do you actually believe this?

when in doubt, it's better to assume capitalism than anything else.

To carry on this analogy - do test prep workbooks make you meaningfully more competent in general, or is it benchmaxing? (Versus studying textbooks for a similar time, of course.)

Their best models are getting more and more expensive, and still aren't SOTA.

It's almost like there's an actual cost to developing these models, and the Chinese don't have magic dirt that allows them to do it at a fraction of the cost.

I'd love to live in a society where people and corporations do good things for PR.