“Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?

paol_taja

The "too dangerous to release" line was definitely a marketing stunt. OpenAI already used the same playbook with GPT-2 in 2019, and some of the same people involved back then are now doing it again at Anthropic with Mythos. Same safety-branding DNA, different company, and people are falling for it again.

djvu97

> Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later. I guess it was too dangerous to even read the article

marginalia_nu

Jesus has microwaved a burrito so hot he can not eat it, refuses to show the world, citing dangerous omnipotence paradox.

lgcmo

Mythos had to silence you apparently

dwa3592

Silenced immediately.

wood_spirit

My thinking is that if it really was super duper then Anthropic could charge eye watering amounts and have willing customers and set up expectations going forward that SOTA costs a lot to use. That they don’t suggests that really it is only incrementally better than Opus 4.7 and that the market won’t bear a price increase that makes it economical to serve let alone profit from serving. So the cynical me imagines execs sitting around the table and worrying that releasing it at anywhere close to break even would risk actually hurting the brand instead of setting them up as a premium company, and this at a time just before ipo when they can ill afford that rumour. So they wonder what to do, and think playing national security card is the obvious way out. It’s incrementally better enough to find bugs that previous sota missed, it doesn’t get used widely so it’s cheap to serve and they get the good publicity without the economic scrutiny? Making a loss selling to a small number of users using it in a limited way is entirely affordable. Making a loss selling it at scale is correspondingly unaffordable?

ed_elliott_asc

It all sounds a bit too marketing-ey to me “we have this amazing model that is too good to release” but the goal is still AGI? Ok right.

crudgen

For marketing purposes it is always too dangerous, not saying it is safe

tomaytotomato

AI has always been dangerous, but not existentially dangerous. Mythos is dangerous but it's not going to Skynet us. Just the same as the military drone using some sort of OpenCV library and target prioritisation loop isn't going to turn evil on us.

22spaj

This lengthy article by a self-described "AI enthusiast" muddies the waters. Yes, Anthropic has capacity constraints, which is why they rented Colossus from Musk despite the danger of being distilled. The real reason is that the hype around Mythos has already gone quiet because it does not find more than other models. That is, nothing at all in most open source projects. If you hide the model, embarrassing statistics will not be posted.

holysoles

The thought of this didn't even cross my mind until yesterday. I previously figured the hype was primarily around marketing, but after watching this Primagen video, I have the same suspicion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaGOKd4jqEk

whyenot

It's probably a little of both: dangerous and expensive. This article makes a good case that the cost is at least part of the reason. I wish the article could have been a lot tighter and shorter. This is not earth shattering information that requires a New Yorker length piece of investigative journalism.

miroljub

My guess is they are still in the "fake it till you make it" phase. There's no Mythos, it's just a hype machine fueled by a hot air.

goldenarm

When your logo is AI, your illustrations are AI, and you profile pic is AI, I'm going to assume the text is AI too and won't read it.

micromacrofoot

It's probably not much more dangerous than all the AI security patching being done without it, CVE rate is approaching a straight line up

yanis_t

My posts* got to the first spot on hackernews couple of times. Never once it broke down like that. And why would it, it's just a bunch of html and css files served through (free) vercel (don't think it matters). I wonder what do people run their blogs these days, so they fail under the pressure so easily. * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yanist.com

vrganj

The real Mythos was the friends we made along the way.

einszwei

Opus Fast Mode is 30$/150$/M Input/Output cost. Mythos's pricing (from model card) is 25$/125$ Input/Output cost. Based on this I doubt that Mythos pro is too dangerous to release or provides significantly more value.

lenerdenator

I'd be tempted to offer this as a consultant service were I at Anthropic. It feels like an AI tool that needs professionals to interface with it. Get some of those professionals, have them work with clients in a targeted way. It helps reduce the exposure the tool has to bad actors, and reduces the amount of resource usage that it will incur, because it's being used only by trained individuals. Use what you learn from the experience to further refine its operation and make it less expensive to operate.

waynecochran

Conclusion: both are true which makes sense. The KV cache scaling yields both the emergent power and requires the enormous capacity.