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Notes -
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
A few immediate thoughts:
For one strain of doomer, this is a good thing: the USG showing willingness to directly intervene and cut down the addressable market for capability-pushing models reduces economic incentives to push the frontier at all costs and slows down the race dynamic. Correspondingly, it's going to be a nightmare for the markets: the AI boom is driven by the idea that frontier models are going to be replacing a significant chunk of global labor, and obviously now this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement.
For another strain of doomer, this is a horrible thing: really this was fairly clear even with the DOD conflict, but now control of AI is now very firmly a direct White House concern - the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.
Companies, especially non-US companies, are going to be rushing to the doors to move their AI workflows off closed-source and onto self-hosted models, another blow for the AI market thesis - the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.
Apropos of that old cyotography algorithm as a book first amendment case, absolutely nothing prevents Anthropic from publishing and open sourcing Mythos 5 weights as a book available world over to strike back at the government. Would be a totally glorious act of self immolation, think Denethor's pyre etc. as China and co are brought up to the exact same level of AI tech as the US in one single, simple, beautiful act of spite.
For the size of models we're talking, I don't think "books" is the right metric. The PGP code in the book was 350kB or so, and 950 pages. Models here are many GB. Even with some optimization, in human readable form it'd be somewhere between a bookshelf and a whole library.
Plus the weights aren't really human readable to begin with, and it's unclear if it'd be a "creative work" as much as C source code. I suspect models, the result of a purely mechanical, if expensive, optimization process aren't "creative" enough to be copyrightable, although that wouldn't stop printing books necessarily.
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