alt Hacker NewsStatement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
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Haven’t we learned by now that software is a commodity, and that revenue only comes from unique products and services?
On the one hand someone will subscribe $4.99 a month for TODO.app or calendar.com because they are paying for a solo dev or a small team to work on constant development and improvement of products filling a particular niche.
On the other hand, Linux, Django, PyTorch, React, Zed, Helix, Postgres, Arch, Chromium, Firefox, Rust, Python etc. ship continually improving, solid pieces of enormous infrastructure for free, to be used freely by all, off the back of hundreds if not thousands of active core developers. These projects and large and complicated. They are also commodities.
Then, ahem*, on the final hand there are of course Windows, Office, Adobe, macOS and iOS, et al which span both categories: monster projects that are also commercial and also commodities and yet they have hooked themselves into the world in such a way that most folks gotta pay for ‘em.
LLMs feel like they want to be in the same category as the OSs of yesteryear, with all the fanfare of major release versions named like 95, 98, 2000, XP… or like Leopard, Tiger, Yosemite, Sequoia. The training and evaluation pipelines might feel like they fall into those categories, but the models themselves — after all, distillations of someone else’s public or private IP — do not.
”In 1991, the United States Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co ended a seventy year struggle among federal circuits concerning copyright protection of factual compilations. Prior to this decision, courts allowed copyright protection for works if the compiler labored over his project, whether or not the work involved originality or creativity.” **
It might seem like a trivialization, but aren’t LLMs just telephone directories? Except instead of phone numbers of a public phone system they contain weights of a mind that’s read a public library? Such works might or might not be proprietary based on “sweat of the brow” copyright laws.
* after Niven/Pournelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand …
** https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
How totally absurd.
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
Well looks like USA 3 letter agencies are worried about all their backdoor getting closed
This is DOD retaliation
Good thing I just maxed out my weekly usage limit at 5:10pm on my cheapo $20/mo plan.
Got an email that I can cancel if this doesn't work for me.
As I only signed up to check out the fable, I just did this.
"Refund of €96.84 processed. Expect it in 3–10 business days."
Let's see how long it takes. Funny that it never takes this long to be deducted from my card.
This is all great for marketing.
There is always way too much drama with Anthropic. They could've just called it 4.9, but no, they had to dramatize it to the max. Well, this is what happens. I'll just bypass all the drama and stick to Codex. I also don't want to unnecessarily pay 100x.
I appreciate how they waited till SpaceX IPO.
feels like competitors influence over government to mess them up.
Crypto Wars v2. I know how this movie ends.
WSJ article (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-halts-access-to-top-ai... . The accessible portion mentions a letter from Howard Lutnick.
USA_RESIDENT=true is back lol
They should be happy this happened before their IPO.
This looks like, potentially, a big dent in projected Anthropic revenue. It could affect their price if they were trading publically.
Any other ostensibly AI companies that have just gone public?
I think this is the beginning of the end of US tech dominance. That being said I personally was not impressed with Fable at all. Apart from burning tokens like there was no tomorrow it behaved like Opus 4.8 and produced more or less the same output. In practice I think it was hard to use due the safety restrictions. With the shadow slop injector it was basically DOA but they changed that policy so at least it still had a chance.
Well, I'm glad I used all my tokens earlier today... It was a good run.
I'm old enough to remember what popped the dot.com bubble. It was the U.S government initiating anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft. Ruh-Roh.
It's crazy that people's anti-AI bias has got them rooting for the current administration just because it appeases their desire to see AI labs fail.
I do not care.
Either deliver on your fuckass promise to end the world and replace everyone and make everything shitty forever or fuck off.
Shit or get off the pot already, clowns.
A fantastic move to ensure the rest of the world keeps using Chinese models.
Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: they're coming for your open source models next!
Dario must be popping a champagne tonight as regulatory capture has successfully been initiated.
We've all been debating what moat these labs possess. Today we learn the moat is regulation blocking the usage of foreign open source models.
misAnthropic will soon ask for IDs to give you all a nerfed model, and you have no other choice because deepseek/qwen/Kimi will soon be banned thanks to misAnthropic's efforts to lock us into their regulated product.
We will soon realize the long game that Dario has been playing by painting his own product as an existential risk.
This is very transparently Trump admin retribution, and I'm surprised this fact is being so widely ignored.
I am a bit surprised they can’t make serious free speech arguments.
Ok, so why can i still access fable? Did they forgot to pull the cable?
I give it until Tuesday at the latest until it's accessible again.
AI apartheid has begun.
Ok after 2 hours.. I really miss fable. Opus is fine, Fable just got it.
Will an Anthropic insider please leak the model weights to bittorrent or ipfs or hyphanet? You will be a hero to the world if you do! Thank you in advance. :^)
This is a continuation of the clapback from DoW kerfluffle right?
I just upgraded my plan to try out Fable and now this
just on the basis of narrow jailbreak window? At this point it may be all for marketing, an opus 4.8 would be more powerful for specialized task than vanilla fable5
I do agree with the skepticism in this thread. But, if we assume Fable/Mythos really are that good (=easy to misuse) and thep keep getting better, what similar responses (signals) would you expect to see going forwards?
This is making me extremely depressed. If this was coming from Anthrohpic I would just need to wait for OpenAI to drop a similar model. But if this comes from the US government, they will do the same to OpenAI when the moment comes.
Similar things will happen with China, and the EU has zero-chance of developing frontier models. We are just fucked now.
The model has now become unavailable in the Claude app.
Same model that costs $12 in tokens to finally add “overflow-x: hidden;” to an element, by the way.
I really hope this is just an 'fu' to Anthropic for their disgusting business behavior.
The funny thing is that the model isn't even impressive. I'd still use ChatGPT over it for anything other than design work. As soon as OpenAI cracks design, I'll never touch an Anthropic model again.
This feels like a bad precedent of things to come.
I like to think that the long arc of history bends towards greater access to knowledge and intelligence. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To be collectively less ignorant and more aware of how the world works? But I guess that's not what the US gov wants. Crazy times, truly. The mask is really coming off lately.
Is it just me or is this really bad for their ipo, insane valuations and data centers that are being built r n? This might end the hype…
Yep. Time to explore the chinese open source models.
.
Time to switch to open weight Chinese models.
Any company that uses Magaland LLMs should be aware of the very real Trump related risk.
What happens if the LLM your firm runs on is disabled tomorrow, because Trump wakes up feeling slightly annoyed...
Are people really going to hurt by this? Opus 4.8 can do a vast amount of the same tasks at half the price. How many people are really doing cutting edge work?
HN is mostly bitter cynics that think they understand AI safety better than the people that actually work on it.
Hormuz moment for Mythos
This is the kind of supply risk everyone should plan for. Depending exclusively on one country, one provider, or one model is not going to cut it anymore. I'd double down on improving opensource local models even more and getting harnesses, routers, and testing right.
The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.
This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.