The narrative about AI and AI companies told in mass media diverges more and more from the things actually happening. - The promises AI companies make become more transparent lies to me with every new outlandish story.
Mythos (aka. Fable) by Anthropic and all the drama around it is the perfect example.
According to my sources (listed at the end) Mythos/Fable isn’t just as much better at coding tasks compared to Claude Opus as Opus is compared to it’s predecessor.
This improvement is actually pretty boring. It’s downright pathetic when you take into account that it’s mostly bought with a much higher demand on compute for prompt processing. (This is mostly my speculation, because Mythos/Fable is much more expensive.) So it is much more expensive to run. Since Anthropic is still operating on a loss an even more expensive to operate AI is not good for business at all.
But at that point comes a strike of genius by the marketing team. They pointed out the additional security vulnerabilities Mythos could find and used that information to dress up Mythos as a super powerful super dangerous thing. And public media ate it up. - The Myth about Mythos was born.
That gave Anthropic a cause to delay the introduction of Mythos, without hurting the companies perceived worth. It allowed to restrict access to a level their infrastructure could handle and allowed for higher prices for the exclusive club of people who get access.
The truth or at least what I suspect to be the truth would have made a much worse story: “Our new flagship is a little bit better than the old one, but it’s much more demanding on our infrastructure, so we have to limit it’s use and demand a much higher price for using it.”
The Myth got a bit out of hand, when the government classified Mythos/Fable as a cyber-weapon and shut it down completely … but that narrative is still much better for the stock price than my interpretation of the story.
This is mainly based on Information form the Podcast “Deep Questions” by Cal Newport:
Especially those two episodes:
Does this make scene? Is the world falling for a fantastic fable? And how much might I be delusional instead?
I’d love to hear more opinions from this community, because IRL this topic is way out of scope for the people in my immediate environment.