> But <i>this</i> government [...]<p>I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. <i>This is the whole problem</i> with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
But in democracy you <i>do</i> get to say which government you want.
Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.
You say it, but you don't always get it.
US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
Of course the tired follow-up: “But if the government was functioning properly it would only do the things I want”.
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.<p>We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card.<p>But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.<p>The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.<p>I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
> Over time the gems will rise to the top<p>I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.<p>Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.<p>> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.<p>He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.<p>Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.<p>Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
Potentially relevant: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050</a>
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
the bigger point i think stands - we're going to have a similar story with AI as for example the 40-bit encryption of the past and drones of today, i.e. sure export controlled and most probably regulated practically away for general public. I.e general license to possess/access 8B model max, and maximum 3 models summing to max 16B in total.
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
<a href="https://archive.ph/ERGwR" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/ERGwR</a>
Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...<p>Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.<p>Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
Chinese model companies are already beginning to close, instead of opening. The latest big Qwen models are not open, for example. And it doesn't look like they will be, either.
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.<p>I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
> So 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.<p>They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.<p>> 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.<p>The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.<p>I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:<p>> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)<p>It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.<p>> 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.<p>What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
> The world is a bit bigger than US and China<p>With respect to AI capabilities is it really?<p>I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.
Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too
Mistral in the EU, for one.
Unfortunately Mistral is not close to the frontier. Their last release Mistral Medium 3.5 128B is near the performance[0] of QWEN-3.6-27B, a much smaller model that was released earlier.<p>It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.<p>[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.
Within Spec Driven Development style coding for me Claude Sonnet 4.5 was the game changer and Mistral is I believe at that level already. GLM is allegedly also on par with even some of the Opus models, so if the US vendors would vanish tomorrow, there would be alternatives. Would I miss Opus 4.8 and the Claude Code harness? of course I would! But the world wouldn't stop.<p>What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
I've been thinking a lot about Jack Ma tonight.<p>For some time now, leaders within the US government have been defying the rule of law and due process. And I've felt this gap across communities and platforms to truly articulate why American corporations, capitalism <i>and</i> American prosperity need the rule of law.<p>If the POTUS isn't bound by law. If the POTUS and his associates can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, heck the CEO?<p>Or, I don't know... Start with a softer target? A company whose products are an issue of "national security" and has been designated a "supply chain risk?"<p>Maybe using this threat certain parties connected to certain politicians can have a few shares reassigned to them...<p>A lot of Americans will say that I'm grasping at straws, or being far fetched. They would be wrong.<p><i>This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."</i><p>You might be in one moment. You won't be in the next. Ask Jack Ma. How has he been doing?<p><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/china-alibaba-crackdown-jack-ma-b1817689.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/china-alibaba-crack...</a><p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/jack-ma-isnt-back/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/jack-ma-isnt-back/</a><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344</a><p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-returns-5-years-after-largely-disappearing-from-public-view" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...</a><p>The grave sin that Jack Ma committed for which he forfeited years of his life, billions of dollars and control of his company?<p>He disagreed with the regime. Publicly. Fairly harmless criticism,<p><pre><code> The Financial Times reported that the disappearance may have been connected to a speech given at the annual People's Bank of China financial markets forum,[41] in which Ma criticized China's regulators and banks.[41] Ma described state banks as operating with a pawn shop mentality and criticized the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly."
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And so,<p><pre><code> Ant Group made major changes to its ownership structure and corporate governance in January 2023.[42]: 261 That month, Ant Group announced a series of changes in shareholder voting rights, with Ma no longer the actual controller of Ant Group.[50] Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%.[42]: 271 Following these changes, no single shareholder has a controlling stake in the company.[42]: 261 The company's board also added another independent director.[42]: 261 The Chinese government spoke positively of Ant Group's changes, including describing them as improvements in transparency and accountability
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Let's translate that.<p>"improvements in transparency and accountability" = they forced him to sell his voting shares and forcibly removed him from his company.<p>The US is now dutifully following the <i>same</i> trajectory.<p>The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business <i>was</i> underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms. That's no longer true.<p>The US has credibly lost that, and if it fails to regain it in time, then it shall inevitably lose the wealth that system created.<p>It's just how the incentives shape out.<p>Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.<p>You're watching Step 1 of the process happen.<p>The writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's the same process every time in every authoritarian regime. So much so that it's predictable — I wrote a version of this comment more than a year ago. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713798">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713798</a><p>It's going to get worse. And it'll happen in more and more trivial ways to more and more people. It's always the outliers. Until it isn't.
If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.<p>If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.<p>I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
Ask a recent college grad if the world is drastically different today then when they started college.
If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.
Did you think 5 years into the invention of electricity the world already was vastly different? The internet? Would you have written them off because random people didn't know much about them at that point - which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
> which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?<p>That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.
I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.<p>Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!<p>If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
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lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
> <i>it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.</i><p>The Mythos marketing strategy in action
OTOH, maybe Dario is colluding with some people the US government to drum up some PR before the IPO? "OoOoo these models are so scarily good, export controls were forced onto them"<p>So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.