Interesting bit blaming Jimmy Ba for much of the cultural issues:
> Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — who left the company earlier this year — saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
I think when you follow this stuff every day it's easy to lose perspective of the rate of change and these leads seem more profound than they really are when you zoom out a bit.
I'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
I feel like the models have no moat paradigm died when a single model expanded past the memory of single GPU slices. The moat is hosting the model. Even paying a server host to run a rack of GPUs has immense upstart cost, and then you're still struggling to compete on the add-ons of the things on top of the model (prompts, validation loops, etc). You can only throw so much money at a problem.
yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
It can both be true that models at Fable capability level are national security concerns while Anthropic is being hypocritical.
If the Trump admin is also willing to apply the same scrutiny to GPT-5.6 and other Fable-level models, I think it is a good thing. But given the admin's history with Anthropic (such as declaring it a supply chain risk while ignoring Chinese labs), there is some smell of targeting.
I'm not saying they're hypocritical. I'm saying that this would be far less likely to have happened had they not advertised its power by bringing up its danger.
Except they can't - mostly because Sam Altman is savvy enough to not shout from the rooftops the national security implications. The government can't regulate models because models are unmeasurable right now. And whatever test USG can create can be benchmaxxed in reverse eventually.
So at some point - don't say your model is capable of hacking even if it is and you are clean.
But you just hit the nail on the head: "Solo software engineer can't create on of these now".
The current boom in AI and the cloud/social media boom in the recent decade have required ungodly amounts of capital for their resident companies to get off the ground. It's no longer a creative endeavour that basement hackers can participate in. In many ways it is toxic to the original nerd/hacker ethos by shutting out newcomers to the field and increasing wealth inequality, hence the hostility you now see on HN.
I think it felt more polished, otherwise they wouldn't have released it. Fable took more shortcuts, lied more, had stabilizing safeguards removed, and just did what it wanted more than other models.
I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card.
It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no way of providing feedback or getting support. And it is also anticompetitive, but if you truly believe that AI is not a normal technology, it is rational.
It's shady because they were going to silently poison your outputs.
It's actually worse than it sounds initially, because Fable isn't actually omniscient when it comes to safety classification. Many people (myself included) had refusals or fallback to Opus 4.8 for seemingly compliant/innocuous requests.
Wouldn't you be pissed off if they decided to sabotage your project despite having done nothing wrong?
The trouble is the silence, not Anthropic setting guardrails. Claude saying "I'm sorry, I can't assist further because it looks like you're [XYZ]" is fine.
We all know the false positive rates for classifiers on Fable. Imagine being a ML researcher working on any kind of ML/AI project that isn't against their ToS, and having your codebase poisoned and sabotaged silently.
To be fair, nerfing Claude on frontier research tasks is consistent with Anthropic's stated beliefs. So in that sense you can trust them to always behave consistently if strangely. But this launch was done very poorly with the lack of transparency on when the frontier research policy was violated.
Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request.
You want fucking nut jobs like this building models?
It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have it prompt the user back. I'm sorry I can't help you with this request. Chinese models do this for some requests.
It's another thing to actively try to make the model perform worst for your user on purpose because it asked the model to do something you, the model creator, didn't like.
Imagine someone is asking a logical medical question and the model swaps the prompt and purpose being less intelligent and gives bad advice to this person.
How do these people not understand they are stupid.
Is it really crazy to nerf a proprietary model to prevent it from training another model? I don't think that's even remotely similar to giving bad medical advice.
It’s not a nerf, it’s sabotage. That’s different. This is like if you’re driving a car and it detects your pulling up to a competing dealership so it cuts the brakes.
This is, in my mind, effectively malware. We don’t know exactly what code the model will inject, and we certainly don’t know when it will happen. It could very easily introduce vulnerabilities.
Given that the "proprietary" model is built on stolen work at an unprecedented scale, it's at the very least hypocritical to a degree that would not be possible without a fundamentally amoral mindset.
Huh? It's a benchmark by Cognition which (1) is building their own models and (2) offers all providers and thus has an incentive to avoid hyping up any one too much.
> Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — who left the company earlier this year — saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”
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