alt Hacker News>> Test it yourself, GPT 120B OSS is cheap and available. BTW, this is why with this bug, the stronger the model you pick (but not enough to discover the true bug), the less likely it is it will claim there is a bug.
I guess this is the crux of the debate. All the claims are comparing models that are available freely with a model that is available only to limited customers (Mythos). The problem here is with the phrase "better model". Better how? Is it trained specifically on cybersecurity? Is it simply a large model with a higher token/thinking budget? Is it a better harness/scaffold? Is it simply a better prompt?
I don't doubt that some models are stronger that other models (a Gemini Pro or a Claude Opus has more parameters, higher context sizes and probably trained for longer and on more data than their smaller counterparts (Flash and Sonnet respectively).
Unless we know the exact experimental setup (which in this case is impossible because Mythos is completely closed off and not even accessible via API), all of this is hand wavy. Anthropic is definitely not going to reveal their setup because whether or not there is any secret sauce, there is more value to letting people's imaginations fly and the marketing machine work. Anthropic must be jumping with joy at all the free publicity they are getting.
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Mythos isn't restricted for marketing purposes - that would be incredibly dumb because Anthropic would be giving up first mover advantage for next gen models.
It's restricted because it's genuinely good at finding vulnerabilities, and employees felt that it's not a good idea to give this capability to everyone without letting defenders front-run.
That's it. That's all there is to it. It is not some grand marketing play.
In the Anthropic Mythos model cards they explicitly remarked that they didn't want Mythos to be specifically good at security. They trained it to be good at coding, and as a side effect the model is (obviously) good at security. This what happens with flesh hackers too, mostly. Hackers are very good programmers, as a side effect they understand systems well enough that their understanding has security implications.