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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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hey begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet work since the models are not getting much better at JavaScript

This is already happening: https://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents

DeepSeek releases a model that is equivalent to 5.3 Codex

Already almost there if you include all Chinese companies, certainly will be by end of 2026: https://livebench.ai

Frontier models begin to entshittify as they are increasingly jailed to make them safer, while their private reputation is shattered among all of the normies who did not know how rights-violating the United States secret police are.

I'm with you on this one. We've already seen movements in this direction (eg, not releasing Mythos).

It's pretty clear to most people the general improvements to coding are dried up and a lot of the old hype was fake and tooling and chaining was the internal, secret meta from 2025 onwards

And more targeted RLHF, but yes agreed on this. However, I think there is still a ton of yet-to-be tapped potential in tooling, context, and feedback that will have massive impacts even at current model capability.

Overall my timelines are shorter than yours but I do think there is a "ceiling" and I don't think we are at risk of Yudkowsy's takeover scenario. I do anticipate "mundane" surveillance and increased slopification. My hope is in local/opensource models running on ASICs, which would at least alleviate privacy and intentional kneecapping concerns.

Already almost there if you include all Chinese companies, certainly will be by end of 2026: https://livebench.ai

Deepseek 4 pro blows Codex 5.3 out of the water in real world usage.

Which v4 pro are you using? It's terrible.

The deepseek one

The one that is way worse than codex 5.3?

I'm with you on this one. We've already seen movements in this direction (eg, not releasing Mythos).

I disagree with this bit, mostly because I've seen good arguments that the secrecy around Mythos is at least in part due to Anthropic hyping up their own work, but most importantly due to a massive compute crunch on their end. It does have legitimate security implications, of course, but their framing that the delayed release is mostly due to those concerns is, shall we say, a rather self-aggrandizing claim.

GPT 5.5 Pro performs as well or better on cyber security tasks, and it OAI was happy to do a general release. This is one of the rare occasions where I have to say that they were right in mocking Anthropic for poor excuses for their real issues, even if I genuinely prefer Anthropic as a company and the recent versions of Claude for many tasks.

… I've seen good arguments that the secrecy around Mythos is at least in part due to Anthropic hyping up their own work, but most importantly due to a massive compute crunch on their end...

That’s exactly what it is. Behind the marketing department though, there are still interesting things to see with Mythos.

Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, but so are other models. GPT-5.5, already generally available is comparable in it’s capability. The company Aisle also reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.

One of the problems with Mythos is that it’s very expensive to run, and the company doesn’t appear to have the resources for a general release. (What better way to juice the company’s valuation than to hint at capabilities but not prove them, and then have others parrot their claims?)

Modern generative AI systems (not just Anthropic’s but OpenAI’s and other open-source models) are getting really good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I don’t want to say I was a complete naysayer originally (because I wasn’t) but the rate of advancement has raised my eyebrow a few times along with some of the economizing factors.