We already have a window into the future.

- Anthropic told everyone Mythos was dangerous because it's proficiency with biologics and cyber security

- Anthropic didn't release Mythos like everything else. They released a neutered fable. They didn't get rid of Mythos

- Anthropic opens a lab in SF

There was always a quesiton of "will the labs stop releasing their models and start building around them instead?" Yes - they already have. Anthropic is a biologic and cyber security company, in addition to intelligience.

Personally I wonder if they've been holding back a lot. Opus 5.5 was a good release after a little stagnation. Open AI releases good models and everyone says Anthropic sucks and -- Oh would you look at that - a better model finally and all of a sudden.

The way it is right now is to build giga-monster models, use those internally to boost yourself, and distill them down into lighter consumer models.

Apparently OAI is already building GPT7 and GPT8

Yes, both labs already have monstrous internal teacher models they don't sell for inference, this is generally acknowledged. They cut releases for the public just to keep revenues growing, it's not their actual frontier.

Ok. Given this hypothesis, why is the software they release generally considered crappy by competitor standards, benchmarks, and open source standards?

Claude Code is an awful codebase, has leaked its own source code multiple times, and scores the worst on number of tokens burned vs pass rate percentages.

Is anyone even using their Figma competitor?

I always found it odd that people who are intelligent enough to work in IQ-loaded fields are as easily manipulated by either rhetoric or ideology as anyone else.

growing up I always assumed that everyone would grasp some aspect of game theory intuitively, I still remember the day I found out game theory was a thing - it was like finding out that someone successfully systematized common sense.

most people take the things people say as if they were worth considering. signals without cost are only useful as knowledge of what the signaler wants fools to believe.

what a sad state of affairs to have insane people running these companies and insane "rationalist" communities making it all about "the end of humanity" when meanwhile in day to day AI use Pete Hegseth uses it to target military targets, shrugging his shoulders when it's a girl's school instead. This actual horrific outcome does not seem to matter not only to either of these communities, who continue to be locked into thinking The Terminator was non-fiction (and have people like Bernie Sanders on board).

I think the author is missing the point. A company cannot unilaterally pace the frontier -- they'll just be left behind. It requires coordination across all actors who are at or near the frontier.

Even if the leading US labs could agree amongst themselves to a coordinated slowdown (and this would likely run afoul of antitrust law), you still have Chinese labs who will catch up to the frontier eventually. To solve this, you'd need some sort of international agreement.

That's why Dario and others are saying loudly that we should pace the frontier in hopes that our political leaders will take up the issue and do something about it. We'll see if that happens...

Exactly. "Game Theory" keeps coming up in these threads, yet it doesn't seem like anybody knows how it actually applies to this situation.

Let Anthropic pace themselves without any sort of enforcement or even agreement for others to pace themselves, too. Then Anthropic is gone, overnight, and we're back to square one, except now there's even more centralization of power and authority.

These companies are literally asking for governments to regulate them specifically because they need something stronger than just a couple of Tweets from some CEOs loosely agreeing to ambiguous terms.

Imagine your best friend is a chain smoker who keeps telling you how smoking will one day kill him, and he promises you he's doing the best he can to reduce his smoking. He even spends a bunch of his time on TV and writing blog posts about the harms of cigarette smoking, but even more times talking about the cognitive benefits of nicotine. But every time you meet him, you just see him chain-smoking, and he seems to be increasing how many packs he goes through each day. You notice you're confused.

The problem with this analogy, and really this whole post in general, is that it just doesn't recognize that these are businesses which are (at least from some perspectives) producing real value. This article makes it sound like the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic (etc.) is based entirely around building a doomsday device. In reality, the "promise" of AI is that it can greatly improve many people's lives. It's just that such power, wielded incorrectly, can be dangerous.

If you want to fix this analogy, you'd have to choose an activity which isn't effectively only detrimental. For example:

Imagine your best friend is a professional bodybuilder. They keep telling you how the sport will one day kill him, and he promises you he's doing the best he can to minimize those risks. He even spend a bunch of his time on TV and writing blog posts about the harms of professional bodybuilding, but even more times talking about the benefits of bodybuilding. But every time you meet him, you just see him bodybuild, and he seems to be increasing how much he's in the gym, eating his special diet, etc., every day.

Would you be confused by how your friend is behaving? It is well known that bodybuilding can be dangerous. It has been the reason for late-stage crippling of bodies as well as very early deaths. But your friend isn't going to stop because there are some potential risks if you don't handle the activity safely. They like it. They make money from it. They're doing something they think is productive. They can recognize the risks, and even do their best to highlight those risks and try to mitigate them for themselves and others, all while fully embracing the activity.

Regardless, people like the author don't seem to acknowledge that there are good things that come with this technology. They don't seem to acknowledge that a single company can't purposefully stop development if other companies aren't obliged to do the same. They don't seem to acknowledge that "pacing" isn't the same as completely halting all development immediately.

And I'm not saying I'd trust what any CEO says at face-value, let alone the CEOs of these AI companies. But it's also obtuse to assume that everything they're saying is a clever scheme to trick the public into acting against their own well being. As if that's a tenable strategy in this context.

If these companies are all asking to be regulated, then they should probably be regulated. They probably shouldn't be able to dictate how that works, but it's really not unbelievable that they see a serious risk in their own well-being if this stuff goes unchecked: all it takes is for one truly catastrophic AI event to occur before they all get extreme regulations even if they, themselves, are acting safely. It's in their best interest to slow things down, but only if everyone slows down at the same time.