alt Hacker NewsMythos 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.
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>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.
It's a possibility, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility that it's hype. If these claims were indeed serious, they would submit it for independent analysis somewhere.
This isn't some crazy process. Defense contractors are required to submit their systems (secret sauce and all) for operational test and evaluation before they're fielded.
I don't think you can say this with confidence, outside-in. It's not just about safety. The additional unknown is cost - I don't just mean API cost, but fully loaded cost for a given task. Is the model cost effective for tasks such that it has product market fit?
We don't yet know if Mythos was a level shift in the capability/cost frontier, or a continued extension of the same logarithmic capability/cost curve.
If it wasn't marketing it wouldn't have fancy branding... It wouldn't even be announced.
Or, They created the illusion that it's restricted for security reasons but in reality they just lack the necessary for this to be used widespread!
How do you know? If you have access you are not unbiased, otherwise you cannot know by definition.
AI companies routinely claim that something is too dangerous to release (I think GPT-2 was the first case) for marketing reasons. There are at least 10 documented high profile cases.
They keep it secret because they now sell to the MIC with China and North Korea bullshit stories as well as to companies who are invested in the AI hype themselves.
it seems likely it's both a better model to some unknown extent and doing this "we have to give it to the defenders first" thing is super great marketing material. it seems an entirely natural marketing campaign "announce that we can't even give the model to everyone at first, it's so great!", plus there's some truth to it, even better.
unless you are an employee at anthropic and shouldn't be talking about any of this at all, there's no way to know what the model's capabilities are.
Sure, I am not precluding the possibility that they've trained a genuinely great model. All I am saying is that the "this model better than that model" is moot when on one side you have model weights, and on the other side a whitepaper and some accompanying comments on the danger.
I'm not that old but have been here long enough that I remember when GPT-3 was considered too dangerous to release. Now you have models 10x as good, 1/10th the size and run on 8GB VRAM.