The "Best" HN Comments

The US government has restricted access to Anthropic's strongest AI model, Fable, signaling a potential shift toward government control of advanced LLMs. Commenters debate whether this is a punitive measure against Anthropic or the beginning of broader restrictions on powerful AI, with some warning that open-source alternatives may also face limitations.

| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Most-upvoted comments of the last 48 hours. You can change the number of hours like this: bestcomments?h=24 | 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. The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are . If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government | || Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else. Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it. | || The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on. | || When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen. Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals. I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric. | || It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have. I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick | || The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since A we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and B it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing. 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best. This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. | || If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so albiet out of poverty rather than choice but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning: Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it. It is a signal about your wealth and your families ability to deploy it for you , from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now. | || Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public. | || This whole thing is comedy. Anthropic pretending Mythos 5 is so capable it's going to destroy everything, but will release it anyway with "safeguards" when does this ever work? . US Gov't using this fake hype as an excuse to handicap Anthropic simply because they have a vendetta. | || I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between non-technical management who understands how to double click and engineering who holds the company standing . <insert IBM story about IT department cost cuts I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering. | || Asking for donations to pay the AWS bill from the people they fired the agentic code at is the cherry on the icing of the banana supreme. If real, tragically funny. If fictive, we'll written. | || Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models. It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general. | || "Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. Someone obviously engaging with your ideas and taking time to explain their position? Take time to engage with their ideas too. | || The way I see it, a government led by an adult toddler and his sycophants has decided to punish a firm that refused to cooperate with it's military when it was embarrassed by a militarily weak adversary. The model strength spin strikes me as motivated reasoning. The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology. | || But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal—and frontier models know every trick in the book and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before. Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea I'm continually bemused and astonished by the number of people who clearly acknowledge that it's reckless to give agents full access to your machine, and keep doing it anyway. It's like posting a video of yourself in the passenger seat of a car, with your feet up on the dashboard, and saying: "Remember, if you're doing this and you get in a crash, the airbags are likely to break your legs or worse Boy, I sure am glad that didn't happen to me " | || So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped? | || I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use see:VPNs so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control. This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better. | || This to me reads like a poignant commentary on the catastrophic loss of human agency, with the actual commit being highly revealing 0 . Author wants to hide a horizontal scrollbar. Any junior frontend dev worth their salt will be asking right away "where do I stick overflow-x: hidden; ?" A complete solution will then require hitting "Inspect element" in the browser to find the CSS class and running rip grep to find where it is in code, to then add a single line to. An actual proactive programmer might start asking more pointed questions like what content does an empty textbox have that it overflows? And why do I need to insert this workaround that treats the symptom and not the root cause in two different places? Isn't it better to style textarea once? Etc, etc. 0 | || This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with 7 years of support, but others such as Sony are 4 years, and Xiaomi on non-flagship devices are similar, or Samsung on their lowest budget models... | || You're correct about CRISPR Cas9. The off-target affects are difficult to manage. The paper describes Cas12a2. This is a different mechanism with discovery origins in - of all things - agriculture. It does not attempt in any way to reprogram cells. It uses a guide protein to locate a specific mutation with exacting precision and, when it activates, unleashes total destruction of the cell. The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound. Source: I have personally funded novel research based on Cas12a2 for an undruggable condition I have. I have personally seen my condition "cured" in vitro using this technology and it left all of my WT cells unharmed. Some of the researchers I've funded are co-authors in the paper linked. I am a layperson in this field I'm a SWE, not in biotech , but I am happy to answer questions. | || 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. | || Last time I suggested on a similar story that there's a disproportionate number of firms in Israel with an explicit focus on subversion, manipulation, spying and malware, seemingly because a large portion of the Israeli population gain a certain expertise in these fields as part of serving in the IDF and working to suppress Palestinians, I got accused of bias because apparently there's many more Israeli startups working on medical research, green technology and world peace. If there are, they certainly would do no harm in being more vocal, firms like BlackCore is unfortunately what Israel is becoming known for around the world. | || Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks... Are there going to be bans on things that | || As is often the case, the title is hyperbolic. The discovery applies to 20% of tumors, and "one of cancer's significant defenses" or "a key weakness of cancer" would be more accurate. That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you. | || We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort. We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time. After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred , playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes which they've previously shied away from , writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves. It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices. | || The real news here is that Digg is still up :O | || Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book. The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements. We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall. And even Sauron himself was misled in this way The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring. I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making. | || Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me and the other volunteers attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something can't even remember what it was . I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla. But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC an open protocol to Yahoo Messenger a closed protocol . I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest. This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore. So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me. | || The title reminds me of an interesting ancient Chinese anecdote. And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que: “Of you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the healing art?” Bian Que replied: “My eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I, Bian Que, am the least of the three.” King Wen said: “May I hear why?” Bian Que answered: “My eldest brother sees illness in the spirit, before it has taken shape, and removes it unseen; therefore his name is known only within our household. My second brother treats illness when it is but a hair’s breadth from appearing; therefore his name does not travel beyond our village lane. As for me, Bian Que: I pierce the blood vessels, administer strong medicines, and cut open the flesh. Thus, by such visible acts, my name has spread among the lords.” | || I'm a little less charitable. Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply. If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color". They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent. The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first. You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator. Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning. Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful. | || |