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. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
They both are bought and paid for by the Epsteinites: D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors, while R lets the benefactors dump toxic waste into water tables. They hit us from both sides.
US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"
The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
> D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
Not in the US, and not addressing whether the governments controlled were tyrannical or not (in many cases the rebels were definitely bad) but there are lots of wars around the world that were started by people with small arms and home made bombs that built up into full scale wars.
Neither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?
It raises the risks for the enforcers taking a paycheck to oppress the [subset of the] population. Bullies think twice when they can be punched square in the face.
Riiiiight, it doesn't just make the bully invest billions in military grade weapons to be used against civilians. Soon you'll have superdrones with superguns patrolling the US and you will still be clinging to your right to carry a musket.
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
> Those days are long gone.
> Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.
No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.
That is what I meant by anarchy - the state anarchism wants to achieve. Collins dictionary says anarchy is "4. the theory or practice of political anarchism" but it seems it might be a British usage.
I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.
>That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
> Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does.
You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.
If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
Iâm pretty certain that most of my issues are with a specific kind of government, not with government in general.
Government is fine if itâs done by people that arenât in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if itâs done by people only in it for themselves. Itâs just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
> "Government is fine if itâs done by people that arenât in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
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 âtheir teamâ.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
That is true in the US, but that is not typical. I cannot think of another democracy that is as firmly two party as the US. Even the UK which I felt was too two party has always had some smaller parties (for many decades the Liberals, and then the Lib Dems, and Northern Irish parties), many smaller ones more recently (add the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists) and with two smaller parties gaining a lot of ground in the last few years the next general election looks like a four way fight.
In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.
That's not a choice, that is theatre to convince you to not get together with your neighbours to go lop heads off. It is manufacturing governing consent. Democracy does not to empower you, it only exists to convince you [loosely] of the state's violence being righteous.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
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.
I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy.
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.
This betrays a simplistic understanding of democracy. In short, its meaning cannot be derived from decomposing its etymology, and your take here is ... certainly unique.
Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the majority.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Some people call what I'm describing here "liberal" democracy, but that's to distract from the fundamental fact that there is no meaningful definition of democracy that isn't liberal. If we're not free and equal, we cannot participate in democracy, and therefore it isn't democracy.
> Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties.
This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.
It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.
> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.
Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.
If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.
If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.
Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.
Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.
Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.
ÂŤWhat is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.Âť
> This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept.
It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.
Did you think democracy was not a modern idea? It unequivocally is. The word comes from Ancient Greek, but what they did had almost nothing to do with the current definition of the word.
This focus on ethnic groups that you have is simply just not germane to this discussion. Democracy as it is currently understood does not have anything to do with "ethnic self-determination" (reeks of Blut und Boden - what the hell does it even mean to have an "ethnic self"?).
I don't know if you are inspired by neo-fascist thought or what's going on, but your understanding of democracy is extremely unconventional.
The only people who didn't vote along ethnic lines were westerners in the past 40 to 80 or so years, and that is rapidly changing and will almost entirely disappear in less than 50 years.
You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.
This is why foreign rioters who incite violence get no sentence, while native rioters get the book thrown at them.
> You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
Tell me you've never actually been to Western Europe without telling me... This is so profoundly disconnected from reality that I don't know where to even begin.
But thank you for confirming my hypothesis in another comment that you are indeed inspired by neo-fascist thought.
There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.
No. The average Democracy Index of Western Europe is 8.05 (full democracy), while the US scores 7.65 (flawed democracy, trending downwards). Just below Poland, just above Botswana.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Is the index measuring how wealth distribution minimize disparity? How policies debates are driven by spontaneous needs from general public, and how solutions are proposed and refined through open to everyone debates, how programs (not some random face) are voted be it as whole or per compatible submodules? How imperative mandate are dully applicated and how any tentative of corruption is punished with several years of being forbidded of taking any mandate?
Then check V-Dem, you might argue they're flawed as well but then I'd suggest you to provide counterexamples for why the US should be considered a functioning democracy, and is not on the way to a fully authoritarian state.
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trumpâs brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
Itâs the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, âmy team is good and your team is badâ. People scoff at things like WWE but itâs really no different if you have a âmy teamâ in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, itâs still all âscriptedâ, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.
Sure, there are some differences and itâs not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but itâs still controlled by an overarching control harness.
Itâs why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time itâs flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when thereâs cycles of tension and conflict to move people. Thatâs how narcissistic manipulators work.
Itâs one of the ways in which you can tell theyâre behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that thereâs always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissistâs interest and desired direction. Itâs insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic systemâs interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people ⌠so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped ⌠ideally into submission. Thatâs all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
> 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. This is the whole problem with government involvement!
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
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
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the âflash gameâ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
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.
Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.
On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.
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
Iâm 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.
Same as with Google, where theyâve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
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 iâm saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
Its because the people that are eager to develop with llms are talent-less and have no brain muscle of their own left, they're letting the connections between nuerons atrophy with every prompt they send (literally)[0].
I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they?
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we canât yet anticipate):
Generate misleading news articles
Impersonate others online
Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
Automate the production of spam/phishing content
> These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the âdeep fakes (opens in a new window)â phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.
These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
Ah, yes. You see, itâs not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, itâs everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, waitâŚ
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm theyâre causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
I'm not an AI booster, but in this case I'd say that pausing the rollout for mitigations (such as public education) to be put in place was the responsible course of action.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).
No hindsight needed. These problems were obvious from the start. Not just to me but to many others. Clearly also to them.
> indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence)
Two things can be true at once. Of course itâs marketing to say âthis is too dangerous to releaseâ if theyâre going to do it anyway. Either that or theyâre so supremely irresponsible and greedy that they donât care about the consequences as long as they can profit. And again, all of those can be true at once.
Also, worth noting that when they talk about it being âtoo dangerousâ, theyâre usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience and enslaving humanity. But there are many other dangers (as listed in the comment above) to consider that come from humans directly misusing the technology.
They did try to place limits on their API, and tried to develop classifiers for AI-vs-non-AI text (which was abandoned in 2023, in a world of many models). A lot of their efforts in those days seemed to be to work with Universities to figure out what to do about all of this incoming tech. They weren't the first to develop a language model.
> when they talk about it being âtoo dangerousâ, theyâre usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience
They didn't talk about "it" (that model) in those terms, as mentioned above. Or the following few from what I can see. They seem pretty specific about each model's risks and publish what they can find in the model card. But yes, they have a fear of where things may be in the future if models keep progressing.
I don't personally think talk of it being "too dangerous" is good marketing if the goal is to get rich. It invites restrictions from governments and others. I don't know anyone that picked a model because it was apparently restricted: most of their funding comes from Companies that are generally risk-averse. Online AI hype seems to mostly come from the demos, not the doomerism.
I do think there's an uncomfortable trade-off involved in all of this, and some of it comes down to whether you think the tech will be developed regardless of your participation. I believe the people in labs like Anthropic are worried yet think they are better off steering it the right direction, so they push on.
To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
>Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race?
Probably convincing humans that untrue things are true. Think less "AI launches nukes" and more "AI convinces people in country A that country B is trying to subvert & destroy them, while it does the same for country B wrt A."
AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.
AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
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.
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> 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 arenât.
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.
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.
Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
If you do not pay for access to the latest models, your experience with AI is a 6-12 month lagging indicator as to current capabilities.
Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.
I pay for codex & claude. Both out-code me but I'm a novice. Fable is really good and shockingly capable. But they're still dumb as hell in various ways. They're faster than the best humans but they are not better problem solvers, especially for novel stuff like implementing SOTA 3D boolean algorithms in Blender.
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
I fully agree and this other side of excessive scepticism people are ruining it for everyone else. They are a big distraction. They keep saying things like:
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
>This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us.
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
Mythos found 1000 zero days in a few weeks - if I had asked your thoughts on this a few years ago, I'm sure it would've been "that is a super-weapon".
Plus, scaling laws are impossible to deny: More compute = more intelligence.
AI is going to completely redefine the role of human cognitive ability - if you think this is about "state monopoly", you're really thinking too small.
Yes, I want that 'super weapon' in everyone's hands. Better than the hands of a few. Same thing as literacy. I believe in the power of the do-gooders to overwhelm the do-badders.
Ok but you canât hand wave safety concerns. I agree that they shouldnât get monopoly over it but what if AI is strong enough to synthesise weapons and help in cyber security?
Whatâs your answer to it? There are other people who have thought of it and itâs not that simple.
It literally is for marketing dude, Dario loves this shit and it's been his modus operandi for years.
You think this is a coincidence that it's happening shortly before Anthropic IPOs?
How many people in the US government (at senior levels) are currently on track to profiting massively from a huge Anthropic IPO? The answer is, most of them. Most of the most powerful CEOs, senators, congressmen, Trump's retinue, are invested in Anthropic through on vehicle or another.
I use AI all the time and Opus 4.8 can't even get the most basic shit right about a very popular videogame released a few years ago. It's not going to steal your baby and eat your wife.
it's an explanation, but you have to have tunnel vision to think this is the only explanation.
I think they truly believe what they say when they say it's a very dangerous piece of tech and from their wargamed scenarios they figured they really need to be first or shit properly hits the fan - and I agree. their need for money assuming scaling trend holds is transient if they're first.
This is so true, if anyone posts any positive aspect of AI, those comments are downvoted to abyss. As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety and saying AI is evil and must be stopped is so selfish when AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Whatâs so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
> As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and whatâs the time frame for that future?
"Meanwhile, Anthropicâs competitors have friends up and down the administration â the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that itâs no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
Why would foreign (relative to the US) models suddenly sit still? There's enormous incentive to improve; surely they'll be able to figure out how just like their American counterparts?
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.
Even without those incentives, the messaging is clear: you don't want your inference to be shut arbitrarily. Export controls are nothing new but a lot of people have underestimated them due to globalization and the general nature of software. This is a good opportunity for entities around the world to get their setup going.
What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
> How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
Do you honestly think that this - logic and reason - is going to stop anyone from hyping whatever nonsense he comes up with to the moon and back anyway? Right after the SpaceX IPO of all things?
There are many people in this administration invested in OpenAI like the Kushner's. They are attacking Anthropic however they can. You will notice a lot of propaganda on social media sites against anthropic. It's very obvious.
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals?
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
Certainly to stop people with US businesses from doing business with Iran or Cuba. To stop an American owned British company from doing business in the UK? To stop a French company doing business in France? To stop either doing business with the rest of the world? To stop anyone doing business with China?
They absolutely can impose sanctions on foreign companies by restricting their access to US markets, investments and penalizing US banks doing business with them.
For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.
It indeed is a wake up call. But at the same time the strong data protection laws, copyright and privacy laws make it extremely difficult for a European company to develop a frontier model. Activist lawyers can sue and drag startups for training their model on a news article and the legal expenses would be higher than the engineering costs.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
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
Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
> 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 âpick winners and losers in the AI raceâ 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.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their âmarketing stuntâ with Mythos. As Iâve said before, this isnât the first time weâve had an AI CEO argue that something is âunsafeâ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
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.
MiniMax and Moonshot both literally just released the weights for their latest flagship models, a few weeks after DeepSeek did the same. One lab a pattern does not make.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
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.
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?
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
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.
> OpenAI did the same âtoo dangerous to releaseâ song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
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.
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.
There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
> 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.
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.
> 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 canât use it (technically, only if youâre 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.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> 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 OpenAIâs GPT-5.5)
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.
> 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 canât use, but Iâm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you donât. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. Thatâs true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
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.
You canât just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
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.
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.
[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.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
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.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
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.
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.
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"
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.
> But this government [...]
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. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
They both are bought and paid for by the Epsteinites: D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors, while R lets the benefactors dump toxic waste into water tables. They hit us from both sides.
US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"
The people who are really into guns and the second amendment are somehow on the side of their oppressors.
few years ago they weren't
Ffs, Trump is not an oppressor. You're not helping by pointlessly exaggerating things, you'll only derail the discussion.
The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
how useful will those guns be against an army of AI driven drones
just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
More than you'd think but it'd get unbelievably ugly. Reign of terror would look like a cakewalk.
> D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
Not in the US, and not addressing whether the governments controlled were tyrannical or not (in many cases the rebels were definitely bad) but there are lots of wars around the world that were started by people with small arms and home made bombs that built up into full scale wars.
Brady bill? Blue states and cities making it impossible to conceal carry?
Neither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?
It raises the risks for the enforcers taking a paycheck to oppress the [subset of the] population. Bullies think twice when they can be punched square in the face.
Riiiiight, it doesn't just make the bully invest billions in military grade weapons to be used against civilians. Soon you'll have superdrones with superguns patrolling the US and you will still be clinging to your right to carry a musket.
2A people don't want the right to carry a musket, they want the right to those same superdrones. You are framing their desires in bad faith.
I find that incredibly hard to believe.
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
Taking that argument to absurd levels we should only sit and wait for the first school nuking then.
That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.
despite not doing what they claim to do, this is still what they always claim to do.
Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.
âAdvertisingâ vs âdoingâ
Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
> Those days are long gone. > Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
I know it's not what you mean, but Lincoln dramatically shrank the size of the Confederate government.
Trump is much more of a statist than previous Republican presidents (and arguably Democratic ones as well).
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
> unless you presume government is beneficial
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.
>No government at all implies anarchy*
No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.
That is what I meant by anarchy - the state anarchism wants to achieve. Collins dictionary says anarchy is "4. the theory or practice of political anarchism" but it seems it might be a British usage.
I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.
>That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
> Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does.
You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.
If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
Iâm pretty certain that most of my issues are with a specific kind of government, not with government in general.
Government is fine if itâs done by people that arenât in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if itâs done by people only in it for themselves. Itâs just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
> "Government is fine if itâs done by people that arenât in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
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 âtheir teamâ.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.
You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.
That is true in the US, but that is not typical. I cannot think of another democracy that is as firmly two party as the US. Even the UK which I felt was too two party has always had some smaller parties (for many decades the Liberals, and then the Lib Dems, and Northern Irish parties), many smaller ones more recently (add the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists) and with two smaller parties gaining a lot of ground in the last few years the next general election looks like a four way fight.
In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.
To add, the multiple parties in the UK just means I have more choices that are not close to my political views!
While the USA is famously a two-party system, thatâs not true of every democracy.
Another prediction win for the Simpson's [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8hDsIoEFYw
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.
That's not a choice, that is theatre to convince you to not get together with your neighbours to go lop heads off. It is manufacturing governing consent. Democracy does not to empower you, it only exists to convince you [loosely] of the state's violence being righteous.
There's currently no real democracy on earth.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
> There's currently no real democracy on earth.
That's a claim.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
So you think a country that didn't allow 50% of the population to vote was "democratic?"
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.
I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy.
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.
This betrays a simplistic understanding of democracy. In short, its meaning cannot be derived from decomposing its etymology, and your take here is ... certainly unique.
Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the majority.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Some people call what I'm describing here "liberal" democracy, but that's to distract from the fundamental fact that there is no meaningful definition of democracy that isn't liberal. If we're not free and equal, we cannot participate in democracy, and therefore it isn't democracy.
> Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties.
This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.
It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.
> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.
Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.
If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.
If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.
Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.
Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.
Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.
ÂŤWhat is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.Âť
> This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept.
It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.
Did you think democracy was not a modern idea? It unequivocally is. The word comes from Ancient Greek, but what they did had almost nothing to do with the current definition of the word.
This focus on ethnic groups that you have is simply just not germane to this discussion. Democracy as it is currently understood does not have anything to do with "ethnic self-determination" (reeks of Blut und Boden - what the hell does it even mean to have an "ethnic self"?).
I don't know if you are inspired by neo-fascist thought or what's going on, but your understanding of democracy is extremely unconventional.
> It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.
Find me one single definition of Modernity that excludes the 18th century.
That is only an issue if you have sufficiently deep ethnic divisions within a country that people automatically vote on ethnic lines.
The only people who didn't vote along ethnic lines were westerners in the past 40 to 80 or so years, and that is rapidly changing and will almost entirely disappear in less than 50 years.
You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.
This is why foreign rioters who incite violence get no sentence, while native rioters get the book thrown at them.
> You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
Tell me you've never actually been to Western Europe without telling me... This is so profoundly disconnected from reality that I don't know where to even begin.
But thank you for confirming my hypothesis in another comment that you are indeed inspired by neo-fascist thought.
All the more reason to let states and local governments do more. Rather than a unitary congress or executive that only 1/2 the people (+/-) like.
The only way to fix things would be proportional representation and moving away from the two party system.
On the one hand giving parties more power sounds a little gross.
On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...
A lot of things are easier at the federal level.
After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.
There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.
No. The average Democracy Index of Western Europe is 8.05 (full democracy), while the US scores 7.65 (flawed democracy, trending downwards). Just below Poland, just above Botswana.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Is the index measuring how wealth distribution minimize disparity? How policies debates are driven by spontaneous needs from general public, and how solutions are proposed and refined through open to everyone debates, how programs (not some random face) are voted be it as whole or per compatible submodules? How imperative mandate are dully applicated and how any tentative of corruption is punished with several years of being forbidded of taking any mandate?
Their methodology is freely available, you can easily find the answers to those questions.
That index is a product of the institute itself. Funded by non democratic values. Worthless junk / progoganda piece if you ask me.
Then check V-Dem, you might argue they're flawed as well but then I'd suggest you to provide counterexamples for why the US should be considered a functioning democracy, and is not on the way to a fully authoritarian state.
Itâs not perfect, but itâs definitely better than this lazy dismissal.
Itâs actually ok to be more critical of a government thatâs capricious than one that merely advances polices one disagrees with
Of course the tired follow-up: âBut if the government was functioning properly it would only do the things I wantâ.
And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".
Seems a little slippery-slopey to me
I agree with the point, but I think it's fair to acknowledge that the current US government is not a "normal" one in any sense.
Thatâs a strange argument. If my postman shits in my letterbox, is that proof that the whole concept of postmen is a bad idea?
Each government just adds shit on the previous, with small optics differences, anyway.
Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.
ICE does a lot of objectionable things no matter what you think about deporting illegals
> 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've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/
If no government ever got involved we would all be slaves to a family of inbred kings.
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trumpâs brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
> where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment
Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?
Agreed.
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
Itâs the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, âmy team is good and your team is badâ. People scoff at things like WWE but itâs really no different if you have a âmy teamâ in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, itâs still all âscriptedâ, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.
Sure, there are some differences and itâs not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but itâs still controlled by an overarching control harness.
Itâs why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time itâs flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when thereâs cycles of tension and conflict to move people. Thatâs how narcissistic manipulators work.
Itâs one of the ways in which you can tell theyâre behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that thereâs always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissistâs interest and desired direction. Itâs insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic systemâs interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people ⌠so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped ⌠ideally into submission. Thatâs all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...
> 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. This is the whole problem with government involvement!
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
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
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the âflash gameâ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
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.
Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.
On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.
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
Iâm 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.
Same as with Google, where theyâve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
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
Indie dev here. Making games is hard it is one of the few spots in software where all disciples have to come together to make something compelling.
I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.
It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.
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 iâm saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
Speaking of game explorations/ideas enabled by LLMs, here is a 'craft anything' sandbox I'm trying to turn into a game: https://asciidia.com
It is like writing novels: it is not the spelling or typing on the keyboard that is the bottleneck.
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned this. These are cute little interactive demos, not games. It has made me appreciate real game design much more.
Its because the people that are eager to develop with llms are talent-less and have no brain muscle of their own left, they're letting the connections between nuerons atrophy with every prompt they send (literally)[0].
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
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.
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
Maybe because Dario was actually reasoning through potential risks, rather than blindly thinking everything will be okay?
I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they?
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we canât yet anticipate):
> These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the âdeep fakes (opens in a new window)â phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
> The public at large will need to
Ah, yes. You see, itâs not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, itâs everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, waitâŚ
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm theyâre causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
I'm not an AI booster, but in this case I'd say that pausing the rollout for mitigations (such as public education) to be put in place was the responsible course of action.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).
> pausing the rollout for mitigations
What mitigations? Nothing theyâve done is relevant to the four points in the comment above.
> such as public education
Their âpublic educationâ is about as meaningful as alcohol warnings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj4aRhHJOWU
> With the benefit of hindsight
No hindsight needed. These problems were obvious from the start. Not just to me but to many others. Clearly also to them.
> indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence)
Two things can be true at once. Of course itâs marketing to say âthis is too dangerous to releaseâ if theyâre going to do it anyway. Either that or theyâre so supremely irresponsible and greedy that they donât care about the consequences as long as they can profit. And again, all of those can be true at once.
Also, worth noting that when they talk about it being âtoo dangerousâ, theyâre usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience and enslaving humanity. But there are many other dangers (as listed in the comment above) to consider that come from humans directly misusing the technology.
> What mitigations?
They did try to place limits on their API, and tried to develop classifiers for AI-vs-non-AI text (which was abandoned in 2023, in a world of many models). A lot of their efforts in those days seemed to be to work with Universities to figure out what to do about all of this incoming tech. They weren't the first to develop a language model.
> when they talk about it being âtoo dangerousâ, theyâre usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience
They didn't talk about "it" (that model) in those terms, as mentioned above. Or the following few from what I can see. They seem pretty specific about each model's risks and publish what they can find in the model card. But yes, they have a fear of where things may be in the future if models keep progressing.
I don't personally think talk of it being "too dangerous" is good marketing if the goal is to get rich. It invites restrictions from governments and others. I don't know anyone that picked a model because it was apparently restricted: most of their funding comes from Companies that are generally risk-averse. Online AI hype seems to mostly come from the demos, not the doomerism.
I do think there's an uncomfortable trade-off involved in all of this, and some of it comes down to whether you think the tech will be developed regardless of your participation. I believe the people in labs like Anthropic are worried yet think they are better off steering it the right direction, so they push on.
To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
>Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race?
Probably convincing humans that untrue things are true. Think less "AI launches nukes" and more "AI convinces people in country A that country B is trying to subvert & destroy them, while it does the same for country B wrt A."
AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.
AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
Dario's brain child
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
You didn't even need to read between the lines, that was basically what the CEO stated point blank in interviews and in his writing.
(I noted the same thing a few weeks back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341224 but his recent blogposts should make it crystal clear if there was any lingering doubt).
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.
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> 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 arenât.
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.
Oh, so that's why. Well, at least it managed to finish most of the work on one of my pet projects yesterday. :)
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.
Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
If you do not pay for access to the latest models, your experience with AI is a 6-12 month lagging indicator as to current capabilities.
Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.
I pay for codex & claude. Both out-code me but I'm a novice. Fable is really good and shockingly capable. But they're still dumb as hell in various ways. They're faster than the best humans but they are not better problem solvers, especially for novel stuff like implementing SOTA 3D boolean algorithms in Blender.
I'll believe it when I see it.
>these very incredibly smart
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
Is this "multiplied productivity" in the room with us right now?
I fully agree and this other side of excessive scepticism people are ruining it for everyone else. They are a big distraction. They keep saying things like:
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
>This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us.
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
The state is the farmer, and we are the cows.
Safety handwringing?
Mythos found 1000 zero days in a few weeks - if I had asked your thoughts on this a few years ago, I'm sure it would've been "that is a super-weapon".
Plus, scaling laws are impossible to deny: More compute = more intelligence.
AI is going to completely redefine the role of human cognitive ability - if you think this is about "state monopoly", you're really thinking too small.
Yes, I want that 'super weapon' in everyone's hands. Better than the hands of a few. Same thing as literacy. I believe in the power of the do-gooders to overwhelm the do-badders.
I want that intelligence in my living room working for me. I do not think Dario, Altman, or the state should get a monopoly on it.
yeah but they don't want you to and it isn't Dario and sama I've got in mind when I say they.
Ok but you canât hand wave safety concerns. I agree that they shouldnât get monopoly over it but what if AI is strong enough to synthesise weapons and help in cyber security?
Whatâs your answer to it? There are other people who have thought of it and itâs not that simple.
>Ok but you canât hand wave safety concerns
Sure I can! *waves* Thank goodness we have the First Amendment [here in America] and I can just go to a library to find books with that info anyway.
It literally is for marketing dude, Dario loves this shit and it's been his modus operandi for years.
You think this is a coincidence that it's happening shortly before Anthropic IPOs?
How many people in the US government (at senior levels) are currently on track to profiting massively from a huge Anthropic IPO? The answer is, most of them. Most of the most powerful CEOs, senators, congressmen, Trump's retinue, are invested in Anthropic through on vehicle or another.
I use AI all the time and Opus 4.8 can't even get the most basic shit right about a very popular videogame released a few years ago. It's not going to steal your baby and eat your wife.
You sound like you have AI psychosis honestly.
it's an explanation, but you have to have tunnel vision to think this is the only explanation.
I think they truly believe what they say when they say it's a very dangerous piece of tech and from their wargamed scenarios they figured they really need to be first or shit properly hits the fan - and I agree. their need for money assuming scaling trend holds is transient if they're first.
bro for crying out loud this is not some marketing stunt
This is so true, if anyone posts any positive aspect of AI, those comments are downvoted to abyss. As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety and saying AI is evil and must be stopped is so selfish when AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Whatâs so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
> As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and whatâs the time frame for that future?
"Meanwhile, Anthropicâs competitors have friends up and down the administration â the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that itâs no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
Why would foreign (relative to the US) models suddenly sit still? There's enormous incentive to improve; surely they'll be able to figure out how just like their American counterparts?
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.
The US will try to ban them, for being too dangerous or for being an IP violation[0] of some companies we've deemed too big to fail.
[0] lmao how ironic
Even without those incentives, the messaging is clear: you don't want your inference to be shut arbitrarily. Export controls are nothing new but a lot of people have underestimated them due to globalization and the general nature of software. This is a good opportunity for entities around the world to get their setup going.
Potentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050
What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
XAI rents out compute to anthropic. I feel like Sam Altman is behind this that little rat.
What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
Considering he cornered future production of DRAM, I believe it!
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How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
> How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
Do you honestly think that this - logic and reason - is going to stop anyone from hyping whatever nonsense he comes up with to the moon and back anyway? Right after the SpaceX IPO of all things?
There are many people in this administration invested in OpenAI like the Kushner's. They are attacking Anthropic however they can. You will notice a lot of propaganda on social media sites against anthropic. It's very obvious.
>How is that going to help him?
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
This should be a red herring for Europe (and others using US models).
Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.
Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals?
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
The US can create sanctions with legal repercussions, the same way they've done with Iran or Cuba in the past.
Certainly to stop people with US businesses from doing business with Iran or Cuba. To stop an American owned British company from doing business in the UK? To stop a French company doing business in France? To stop either doing business with the rest of the world? To stop anyone doing business with China?
Its really not comparable.
They absolutely can impose sanctions on foreign companies by restricting their access to US markets, investments and penalizing US banks doing business with them.
For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.
It indeed is a wake up call. But at the same time the strong data protection laws, copyright and privacy laws make it extremely difficult for a European company to develop a frontier model. Activist lawyers can sue and drag startups for training their model on a news article and the legal expenses would be higher than the engineering costs.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
As we learned with export restrictions on crypto in the 90s, that disadvantage will be short-lived and backfire in the long-run.
You will miss the good old Europe that only regulated.
this is my take, I hope Brussels has people on the dialer from 6am today. mistral needs 50B euros pronto
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...
Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
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
Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
> 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 âpick winners and losers in the AI raceâ 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.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
The post talks about this kind of rhetoric
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their âmarketing stuntâ with Mythos. As Iâve said before, this isnât the first time weâve had an AI CEO argue that something is âunsafeâ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
>custom harness
Means you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)
Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.
https://archive.ph/ERGwR
Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
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.
MiniMax and Moonshot both literally just released the weights for their latest flagship models, a few weeks after DeepSeek did the same. One lab a pattern does not make.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
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.
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?
By all indications, Fable is way too big to feasibly host locally. Even Opus is probably near enough to the limit.
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
This is why we must diversify our technology stack back to the 80's style of computing heterogeneity.
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.
> OpenAI did the same âtoo dangerous to releaseâ song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
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.
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.
trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
But why depend and rely on AI?
There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
It turned out Amazon are the snitchers on anthropic after all
Edit: if anthropic couldnât resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)
> 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.
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.
> 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 canât use it (technically, only if youâre 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.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> 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 OpenAIâs GPT-5.5)
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.
> 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 canât use, but Iâm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you donât. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. Thatâs true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
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.
But it already is.
You canât just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
> The world is a bit bigger than US and China
With respect to AI capabilities is it really?
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.
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.
[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.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
they already firmly in irrelevant territory
> irrelevant territory
Not for the EU. Given the political importance of LLMs and the talent pool in France (let alone rest of the EU), I fully expect them to catch up.
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.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
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.
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?
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.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
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.
If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, youâre the definition of pathetic.
I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
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.
> it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
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"
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.