There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
80 points
1 hour ago
| 14 comments
| 12gramsofcarbon.com
| HN
modeless
5 minutes ago
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> 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 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.

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FunHearing3443
3 minutes ago
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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 “their team”.
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uludag
5 minutes ago
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> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ 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.

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theahura
57 seconds ago
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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
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pdantix
2 minutes ago
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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
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ookblah
9 minutes ago
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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.
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nozzlegear
4 minutes ago
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> 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

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isoprophlex
7 minutes ago
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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.

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hattmall
2 minutes ago
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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.
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woggy
4 minutes ago
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Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
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matt3210
12 minutes ago
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What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
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johnwheeler
10 minutes ago
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XAI rents out compute to anthropic. I feel like Sam Altman is behind this that little rat.
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2gremlin181
26 minutes ago
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Cider9986
31 minutes ago
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matheusmoreira
7 minutes ago
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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.
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istvan0
27 minutes ago
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> 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 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.

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 OpenAI’s 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 can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s 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.

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matheusmoreira
15 minutes ago
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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.
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Iolaum
18 minutes ago
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> 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.

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bob778
6 minutes ago
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Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too
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SgtBastard
15 minutes ago
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Mistral in the EU, for one.
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emodendroket
9 minutes ago
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> 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 ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ 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?

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matt3210
17 minutes ago
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I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
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throwaway132448
3 minutes ago
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If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
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slopinthebag
24 minutes ago
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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.

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conception
12 minutes ago
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Ask a recent college grad if the world is drastically different today then when they started college.
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Tenoke
15 minutes ago
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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?
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Izkata
12 minutes ago
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> 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.

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