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jchwlast Tuesday at 7:53 PM0 repliesview on HN

I would prefer a pseudo-anonymous account if possible. Obviously if this is a marketing stunt the very not anonymous feedback is called into question immediately.

That said: I already was aware of Mozilla's account and despite what you are thinking, it essentially confirms everything.

> The biggest differentiating factor was the use of an agent harness, a piece of code that wraps around an LLM to guide it through a series of specific tasks. For such a harness to be useful, it requires significant resources to customize it to the project-specific semantics, tooling, and processes it will be used for.

Yep. Sounds exactly right. So the question is do we really need Mythos for this or can almost any reasonably close to frontier AI model accomplish similar results with a sufficiently advanced harness?

Jury's out but my vote is "probably most of the way". After all, alongside all of the splashy zero days dropped by eager AI companies, Greg Kroah-Hartman has been posting many useful, if minor patches to the Linux kernel produced by nothing more than a single 128 GiB Framework Desktop. So apparently, even small models can be very useful if you can find a way to get the noise out.

Mythos could still be very useful and effective and still be mostly a marketing ploy, and that's because until very recently investment in trying to make LLMs work for security auditing has been underserved. Without more substantial information, it's difficult to tell how much better at security research Mythos is vs say, Opus or DeepSeek 4 coupled with a good agent harness would be.

And in that sense, it's the same sort of crap as the GPT-2 and GPT-3 releases. A lot of hooplah about how dangerous it is to humanity. Then it turns out it's only dangerous enough that it needs to be gated behind an additional monthly subscription.