Comment by freakynit
1 day ago
I have a little different take..
Top models, capable of discovering and inventing stuff, held back from public, and available only as for-rent research service (or whatever the relevant bureaucratic term is) to big corporations and government agencies like NASA, DARPA, NSF, NIST, DOE, etc. only.
I have a feeling that we, the public, will stop getting access to more intelligent models starting next year.. i mean, not the incremental ones, but, major ones.. like the one you got going from opus 5 to opus 5.5.
The economics of that don't work out. Government is a small market and can't drive frontier innovation at the scale it's happening today, let alone in the future.
Look at the defense industry: The Big 5 contractors (Boeing, RTX, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman) capture most of the discretionary military budget, and the largest of them is in the $300B valuation range (Boeing, which has substantial non-government revenue). Fine businesses but nowhere near Anthropic's valuation.
Bottom line, the government doesn't have deep enough pockets.
I disagree. I think it does make sense the way it was described; top models for governments or industrial players with deep pockets, and "normal" models for the general public. None of the big 5 defense contractors sells directly to the wider public.
In fact, I'd assume this direction has been widely discussed and considered at Anthropic. I think Fable's release was an experiment to test this.
The biggest risks though are China and Moore's law. In the short term, if you don't offer a competitive model as the market grows, you fall behind in marketshare. Anthropic's edge is that it's offering is still better than Chinese offerings. If they offer anything less than that, something not better but just comparable for example, they lose on price. In the long term, as computing capacity continues to increase, local models potentially pose the same challenge.
So there's plenty of pressure for Anthropic to keep widely offering the best model they can.
Yeah, so long as China exists and wants to keep releasing open models, it's not feasible for Western labs to stop releasing frontier models to the people.
this suffers from the same prisoner's dilemma we already see at play. Any player can defect and in theory capture a "trillion dollar market". Once they IPO, then their service is to maximize (short term) shareholder value. Saying "we reject all the billions in recurring subscription revenue because we are hoping all AI providers will do the same, therefore creating a moat" isn't going to go over well.
The SOTA model dilemma is that you have to pay more and more to train models that focus on less and less of the AI task market, because 95% of tasks can be done by cheap small models.
I think GP's thesis is that selling only to the US government would preserve their moat by preventing distillation.
Also frees up more compute for recursive improvement, and gives them leverage over USG (makes regulatory & legal & other issues disappear) due to the frontier being significantly more effective for military use. There's a lot of chatter around distilled models being "close" to the frontier, but realistically they are optimized only to look good on benchmarks - and are still 6 months behind Anth / OAI models at that.
If the US government is a monopsony buyer, why would it choose to pay high prices?
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There is a good chance of that. This will incentivize the rest of the world. Keep in mind that the world is much larger than the USA, that the USA has alienated a lot of parties that were its allies and friends not that long ago and that there are far more talented people outside of the USA than in it. Silicon Valley had the world by the short and curlies and then Trump came along and pretty much burned it all down. It will take another decade to know how big the damage is but it is probably in the trillions of $ of lost income and that's before we get into intangibles.
I don't want to make this discussion politicized.. but man... Trump truly burned everything down that the US built over decades of hard work and careful planning. And these things are extremely difficult to build back, especially in a world like today's.
Politics is intertwined with economics and finance. Unless by politicized you meant inviting opinions unrelated to facts. What you stated is a fact. The part that is hard to divine is if there's a larger end goal that justifies the loss of trust.
At this point, the best guess is he plans to deflate the currency to make the debt worthless.
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I agree with you but as they say "markets have short memories". After the Ukraine war is over let's see how fast Europe goes back to Russian gas. They're making noises about it now (and parts never stopped).
The world is going to be very different in another two years.
yes, you are no longer trusted. Europe is lucky that the UK and France essentially told the US to fuck off when they tried to stop them developing their own nuclear deterrent. If they had, then right now the alliance between Russia and the US would put the whole of europe at risk of Putins Russia. As it is the French and UK capability is more than enough to counter the russian nuclear threat. As in we all fucking die if russia launches nukes, but it at leats lets russia know that too.
fuck trump and republicans. and yes whatever goodwill you had built up over the last 60 years was up and away like a fart in the wind when you elected a corrupt pedophile for the second time. And it cant be built back, ever. No one trusts you no to pull the rug if we became reliant on you again. What we will have though is a relationship with allies built on equality rather than one main player calling the shots.
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I haven't been back since Trump I. Missed a funeral of a friend. I still have more friends on the other side of the Atlantic than I have in Europe, even so I don't think I will ever go there again. Enough is enough.