alt Hacker NewsSo many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it (technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
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> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
It would be too naive to suppose that the strongest LLMs are available to plebs now.
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> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself.
They probably had Fable-quality models in 2016.
as someone who uses these models day in out, i can confidently say its more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. don't get me wrong, the model is great, but nits no out of the world than GPT 5.5 or similar ones. I would say just go and try this model for serious work and see the marginal difference. the model wins in some cases and loses in many others. so, what is this all about? hype!
If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.
Repeating from the duplicated thread:
First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second. One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa...
There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.
I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.
Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
Bigger picture is AI seems to advance at exponential rate
Pepperidge farm remembers when they banned G4 Macs for export as well