The revenge of Claude Mythos
🙄
Remember two months ago, when the world was panicking over Claude Mythos, sparked in part by a tweet from Axios?
and how Tom Friedman freaked out about it at the New York Times?
And how Anthopic said Mythos was too dangerous to release, and held hushed meetings in Washington?
And how Anthropic’s valuation leapt up after that?
Well here, we are, two months later. And guess what….
(A) the world has not ended (remember how I told you not to panic?) and (B) suddenly, two months later— just as tokenmaxxing has come to end and companies have begun to limit their AI token budgets — Mythos is no longer too dangerous to release.
Nope.
Instead, Anthropic tacked some guardrails on, and pushed it out the door.
Anyone can now use it, for the right price. A press release I just got in my email gives up the game:
Yep, Anthropic — that once said they wouldn’t work on frontier models because they were dangerous, and that called for a pause “option” that would probably never in a million years invoke unilaterally or so long as China exists — just introduced their new frontier model, hellbent on racing everyone on all the benchmarks.
Anthropic once again played the media like a fiddle. And so many folks ate it all up.
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And worse, this routine is not even new. Anyone remember 2019?
If you scroll down far enough in the original 2019 GPT-2 is too dangerous to release blog post, from OpenAI, you will recognize some of its authors who moved on other companies—including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Daniele Amodei, and Jack Clark.
They have been running literally the same play for seven years: scare, hype (evoking media interest), and (eventually) release.
Scare, hype, release. And repeat.
Is it that hard to see?
As Charlie Munger once said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”
Gary, this is sooo good! What you are pointing out is so valuable. Watching how the game is being played is something not everyone can do, so I appreciate you doing this. The possibility of a massive pump-and-dump on the public needs to be pointed out. There appears to be a lot of analysts questioning the finances of the LLM companies and perhaps efforts like your and theirs can protect the public. OpenAI's CFO is questioning whether the company is ready for an IPO by releasing its actual financial performance using GAAP.