Comment by glub
10 hours ago
Dario, Sam, and Elon are all on the same page on this.
So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.
I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky, so what could the other possible motives be, based on what we know?
OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
xAI is tracking behind, and whatever regulation it may be that paces the frontier, Musk is less likely to be affected by it. Therefore xAI should be pro-regulation that stiffles his competition and gives him time to catch up.
> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing
I'm shocked anyone could conclude this. This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI (I know many competent programmers/researchers who do this now). Progress in math has just been insane. An internal model at OAI just resolved one of the most celebrated open problems in mathematics. If anything, progress has accelerated.
> This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI
This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year. We've mostly stayed there since then.
Saying that more people started doing it isn't indicative of significant improvement. Some people just started doing it later.
I can't speak about math because I haven't used AI for that application, but I know that there hasn't been any significant advancement in coding in this year on base models. There has been more RL work, more harness work, more tools, they all expanded some capabilities like cyber or orchestration or tool use, but raw intelligence of base models is no longer where the main focus is.
> This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year.
I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. Opus 4.5 needed a lot of handholding not to work itself into a corner pretty quickly. Fable I basically never need to correct, and I've most become a data source.
What are you talking about - I feel like we’re living in parallel realities. If I had to go back to opus 4.5 tomorrow I’d be hugely upset and significantly slowed down
I'm not. Yes we normalized 1m context window and models tend to hallucinate less.
But models have been somewhat stagnant since Opus 4.6/7.
And in some regards there were even regressions like Claudeisms that are load bearing.
Yes these guys are completely delusional.
2 years ago a model could barely solve the AMC, 1 year ago it got IMO gold, and this year models have solved multiple millenium problems.
Even 1 year ago ai code was just unusable (claude code only became available 1.5 years ago!) and now basically everyone I know from independent shops all the way to faang and anthropic/openai themselves exclusively use some AI agent to code.
Why does HN continue to delude itself that "models are not improving?" Maybe for the simple things they care about its "roughly the same," but they are _clearly_ improving.
> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing
Have they? That seems like quite a claim given the last 6 months, particularly for cybersecurity.
The attention is shifting towards RL, harnesses, and memory systems from the pretrains of more intelligent and capable base models. So extracting additional capabilities from what we already have.
That is a much easier catch up game. GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek flash 4.1 also demonstrate significant jump in cyber capabilities. So yeah, it is a slowdown in the place where it matters. RL has been around for ages, there's no moat there if you already have a good enough pretrain.
Many claims but no clear evidence that they actually find significantly more severe issues compared to open models.
Open models and agents can't be trusted without handholding. Astra can one-shot six months of work. Years of work, even.
OpenAI just solved Navier-Stokes.
Seems like the US is on a takeoff ramp to me.
2 replies →
> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
This is obviously untrue… do you use any of them?
Anthropic could serve Opus 4.5 from a year ago under opus:latest and most heavy users would probably have no idea. Some of them would probably even prefer it.
Yes, I do use them, quite heavily. The only difference at this point is in benchmarks that can't be trusted (see: artificial analysis on Astra), or in the way models communicate.
Most gains are now from RL, which for some reason is hyperfocused on improving cyber capabilities, and harnesses. Raw intelligence gains of base models is absolutely slowing down.
This line will keep repeating because it is necessary for the narrative:
This is legit what a lot of people think. To continue this narrative, they have to keep up the charade of "things are not improving".
Add in a heaping dash of anti-american sentiment, and you will get the truth behind the pessimistic commentary.
Downplaying the latest models capabilities is frankly insane considering what we’ve seen what OpenAI’s models have done without safeguards. That wasn’t possible before this latest generation.
Which is it? Would the regulations slow down competitors or let them catch up, or are you contending it would let American competitors catch up but Chinese ones not?
Yeah, this 100% looks like an effort to use fear to create a regulatory moat.
> So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here. I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky,[...]
And yet, they historically did agree on the existence of AI risk, since before OpenAI was even founded.
> there's some other motives at play here.
I mean it is literally economy 101: some capitalists getting on the top using free market, and then try to use government to remove free market so their top position were secured from any competitors.
Exactly. Textbook definition of “Crony Capitalism”. Which isn’t actually capitalism at that point.
Let's not forget that the competitive race happened because of them. Most of the initial AI research from the past decade started with Google Deepmind. Elon Musk was invited for a preview of it and ended up spinning up OpenAI when Demis turned down his investment offer. Dario was originally at OpenAI and left to start Anthropic.
This seems like a case of "save me from my own mistakes/ambition"
Yet Musk consistently opposes AI regulation - https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/elon-musk-criticizes-ai-re... - even though it might help him.
> So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.
Duh! It’s called collusion. They want to try and hoard the technology for themselves if possible!
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