alt Hacker News> This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models.
It's not wish casting whatever that means. The crux of the argument isn't as much of a capability one as it is an economic one. If China can release open source models like these to displace demand for frontier models so can American companies. It's just that it's not profitable enough for them to do so at this time.
The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it.
> Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another?
They have different business strategies, but at the end of the day they are all directionally aligned. Even if you wanted to extract a few of these companies and say they're not relevant, you can grab a handful and just make the same legitimate argument. Do I believe you, or do I believe the people with trillions at stake. I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise.
> There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.
Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate whether that's regulation, economic schemes, or otherwise. See? You just proved it right here:
> Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.
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> It's not wish casting whatever that means.
Wishcasting is describing a hypothetical. Your statement was about what you think America can do, but not about what it has proven to do already. It is wishcasting by any definition you'll find online. Economic roadblocks are not any less important than capability roadblocks, look at how proprietary UNIX went from a billion-dollar IP business to being entirely cannibalized by "good enough" free alternatives like Linux and BSD. You can whine and call Linux/BSD "communist plots" or decry them for being less powerful than AIX, but history was not kind to nonfree UNIX-like software. They died out, and a superior alternative flourished in it's place. Same happened to Texas Instruments, Espressif and STMicroelectronics IP - American adversaries have access to better, cheaper microcontrollers than America's supply chain can compete with. China's clones already won.
> The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it.
Does it? I don't think Anthropic is profitable yet, show me the balance sheet that confirms Mythos and Fable are putting them in the black. Even with "premium" models, Anthropic and OpenAI are both finding out that it's not enough to move the needle. Hell, their desire to IPO should be enough to understand that their future is overpriced B2B rice bowl contracts and not some benevolent B2C relationship like Google and Apple fought over. Even XAI/SpaceX deserves a crumb of credit for recognizing that the winner is whoever helps the US government transgress the laws of God fastest. The taxpayer is the only one that can feasibly foot the bill, and China has recognized this from Day 1 (say what you will about Xi Jinping thought).
> I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise.
Some great consolation that would be, if you said the same thing for Enron, Theranos, Vision Pro, Meta Quest, Microsoft Groove, Google+, Juicero, Hololens... why, you could be convinced to buy any of history's most dogshit technology. Remember, an appeal to authority is just one third of effective rhetoric.
> Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate
In a so-called free market, that's the most heretical and counterintuitive solution that you can concoct. Laissez-faire lore would have us believe that competition is keeping the market alive, but it's the regulation that is preventing America's businesses from releasing their most powerful models. If this becomes a political policy issue, then China has already won. At that point, America might as well forfeit to save money that would have been wasted on "AGI" research graft.
>It's not wish casting whatever that means. The crux of the argument isn't as much of a capability one as it is an economic one. If China can release open source models like these to displace demand for frontier models so can American companies. It's just that it's not profitable enough for them to do so at this time.
I would back you if:
1) The American companies had not run up debts in the $100bn range. 2) If there was an open source business model that could create $100bn companies or pay down $100bn of debt. 3) There was a convincing moat such as a social media network effect - I mean that lasted 10 years or so for Meta - or ways for them to create a supplier based monopoly like MS did with IBM, Dell, Compaq,.. or Google has with Samsung and Apple. I think that it might be that the consumer use case could yet be tied to Samsung and Apple, so Google might do it again, but ATM I dunno if consumer use cases are the thing here.
>Do I believe you, or do I believe the people with trillions at stake. I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise.
Go look at SpaceX's shareprice.
You are being taken for a ride.