Sabotages, Diffusion, and a $2 Trillion Company

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have lots to talk about. From AI satellites and an AI company sabotaging customers to what I believe is the future of edge AI: diffusion models.

Enjoy!

FRONTIER

Probably the Biggest Self-Own in AI Ever

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, introducing a new Mythos-class model family for advanced coding, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and long-context tasks.

The innovative aspect is that Fable 5 includes additional safeguards relative to Mythos in areas such as cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation, due to risks perceived by Anthropic.

These safeguards are applied using classifiers that detect certain requests in those categories. When detected, the response will instead be handled by Claude Opus 4.8, and users will be informed when this occurs.

In layman’s terms, for some areas like biology or chemistry, this gobbledygook is saying that you aren’t allowed to use the top models for these topics, period.

Only the “selected few” with access to Mythos, unlike the peasants you and I are, will be able to use frontier-level capabilities to make biology or cybersecurity work.

Much worse, for the particular topic of Frontier LLM development, Anthropic has done something unprecedented: they purposely downgrade, or dumbify the model so that it provides worse answers… without telling you.

Have you ever met a company willing to sabotage your responses, without telling you, just because they disliked what you asked?

This announcement caused massive controversy, and today they actually dialed it back: they won’t be dumbifying Fable anymore and will instead explicitly downgrade you to Opus 4.8, like in the other topics… or so they say (I don’t trust their word at this point).

Both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

I don’t want to say I told… but I did. If you’re a regular of this newsletter, you know I’ve not been shy about calling Anthropic out for perhaps years.

I never trusted them, and the world finally understands why.

It all started once they began with their fearmongering about AI destroying humans, equating them to nuclear bombs, and all that condescending “I’m creating a God, only we should do it” stuff without giving a shred of proof.

I will say it stuck with most people for a while. But I didn’t buy it because I understand the technology and its limitations, and I knew from the start it was all a marketing-slash-regulatory-capture strategy.

To me, the most unforgivable thing is not that they decide I’m not worthy of using the frontier models, but the fact that a company trained on all of our data, while training models based on architectures developed by Google, not by them, only to pull up the ladder behind them once they were ahead, is just upsetting.

Just picture a world where these guys get to decide who can use, and when, the most powerful technology humans have probably ever…

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