My bet is that Mythos is still over-hyped and the cybersecurity fear and guardrails are mostly marketing to force company partnerships through Glasswing and get public attention.

It's not even very usable... I tried 2 different chats and both eventually got stopped due to the safeguards

One was a piece of code I gave it to improve, it did so and then started writing tests, some of which tested security so the safeguards triggered

Another was one of the cryptography puzzles I use as new model tests, which are hard to oneshot and there's no public solution anywhere, it completely refused to even try to solve it

They're trained in a model class likely in 2t to 3t range. It's very unlikely that chinese labs have access to gpu systems capable of training models like that, let alone serving them. This requires proprietary room-scale systems which fetch a huge premium over typical 10 slot systems.

I am sure that they can develop their own equivlient version of such clusters in around 1 year though. Distilling fabel 5 will also go a long way.

I wonder if model distillation will continue to work as well as it has. Given hidden reasoning, the ever expanding number of expected capabilities, a serious compute shortage, the looming possibility of model collapse, and dramatically higher API costs I would guess that it's getting much harder to do.

My experience is that open weight models from China are at least ~12 months behind. In some workloads they may be closer, in others further away.

I also find that the harness and product you wrap around models can often narrow that gap considerably.

Opus 4.6 for example, on a PR-for-PR basis was head and shoulders above GLM 5.1. Perhaps GLM 5.1 was a bit under Sonnet 4.6 at the time. That's roughly a year or so behind.

Much cheaper though! I'm bullish on open weight models, I have no idea where all these curves will top out, can the frontier labs keep the year plus lead? Do open labs get close enough to SOTA that they gain adoption across many tasks and drive down inference prices??? Who knows, not me.

There's also a reality where China does develop Mythos-level model but stops releasing the weights.

That reality is much scarier.

I wonder where the trees are. In this thread nobody appears to actually be talking about the model.

Isn't that a good thing in a way? If everyone has the weapon and defense at the same time, we will fix security holes and live safer lifes instead of having some three letter agencies and military backdoors in everything.

Pandora box is open anyway. It's better now for everyone to have the same power rather than a few national states.

It's more evidence that the future is local. With some time we'll all be running highly capable & efficient open-source models on dedicated NPUs. No censorship, no rate limits, no overpriced subscriptions.

I think we're about to see a big relative drop-off of open models vs closed. I don't think there'll be an open model that competes with Mythos for ~2 years.

Even OpenAI and Google are struggling to get this kind of performance. If the distillation defenses are any good + chip controls prevent China from training massive models, it's over.

Oh they might try to put in place safeguards, but Qwen has had no problem being abliterated

3-5 months is a long time and they are pretty useless on arrival because the frontier models are so good, that it's hard to go back even if it's way cheaper. Your work flow is adapted to that level of intelligence for months.

Oh please let’s stop with the Mythos “it’s dangerous” PR talk.

Its obvious Anthropic used it to hype things up and that’s about it.

> every bit as capable and dangerous as current day Mythos except with no safeguards

Not quite. They will definitely have "no criticism of China/communism" safeguards.

> Rationalists are inventing oligopolies from first principles, absolutely incredible things happening in SF.

Based.

I don't think China has any incentive to arm the rest of the world with highly capable models that can be used against them. Undoubtedly they will continue with the arms race, but they will preserve the best stuff for their own use.