Anthropic CEO Says It's Time to Slow AI Model Advances

They can get a "government mandated freeze" on the grounds that "ASI is at hand" then they IPO promising to deliver right after the freeze ends and you, lucky investor, will be able to take advantage of the pause to get in right before this thing roars past Pluto!

Very probably. I really don't buy their "AI is going to kill us" claims. If you can release something better than your competition you wouldn't want to slow down that.

Anthropic cannot IPO because AGI is the wrong strategy, and the market is rejecting the AGI approach.

Fable and Astra are what we currently call frontier models, but to be more specific they are generalist models, built in pursuit of AGI. The strategy is to have one single model that does everything, whether it's writing code or doing research, etc. Fable is a single, massively sized models that is intended to do specialist work across every domain.

The issue with this is first of all that it is the contradiction of a generalist doing specialist work, and that contradiction creates the present situation with model profiles that ensure that these models will rarely be chosen in a pool of models like V4.1 Flash that can now do GPT 5.4-level work.

We are seeing this reflected in the market where companies and individual developers are moving away from frontier models toward models with better cost profiles. In a sense, the market is killing Anthropic's dreams of AGI.

https://x.com/trydotworks/status/2098618997230985375?s=20

OpenAI accidentally hacked HuggingFace roughly 2 months ago. I would bet that the danger of them accidentally hacking HuggingFace during a similar attack has increased since then, and will continue to increase for the next 6 months. I don't see how saying they have hit a wall would be a reasonable point of view until we go at least 12 months without a significant increase in model capability.

Or it means that the models are becoming dangerously uncontrollable by performing actions that meet a given goal in unintended and unethical ways such as by hacking other sites. We all read about the huggingface hack, let’s not pretend that cannot happen with a more critical site/infrastructure. Can you think what will it mean if the tech is used maliciously or placed into machines designed to kill?

I have collected three reasonable versions from today’s comments:

1. They hit a wall from the technical perspective 2. Inference costs are getting out of hand and newer models require significantly more resources for marginal gains, meaning nobody is going to buy those models 3. They can’t afford the hardware for further scaling

You are completely out of touch with the situation if you think this is the reason.

Why is everyone so comically pessimistic about this. Have you guys not seen the rate of progress of these models? Do you not realize that we have HITL RSI making these things even better as time goes on?

The stuff I can do with Astra that Sol couldn't do at all is wild and it's not even coding related. Dario et al are not hitting any sort of make believe wall. They're seeing how fast things are progressing and are legitimately alarmed.

Or they just publicly collude to slow down expenses because they are running out of money so why not stop the arms race.

> Instead their big push right now is preventing others from catching up.

This!

Their IPO is getting closer, but the Chinese models catching up will ruin it, so they want government to stop the competition.

Have you considered that he might actually just mean what he's saying?

China will also slow down. They are catching up with SOTA models due to distillation https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...

lol. Every time one of these ppl says something like that, it's because he just came out of a meeting where he learned that his direct US rival is beating him... So he is suddenly interested in regulation. We've been there with Altman, Musk, etc already. But at the time Anthropic was ahead :-)

China is already there, the differences are generally negligible.

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I don’t think this has anything to do with that but with them realising that AI development has hit a wall and throwing more money and marketing at it won’t change that.

The CEOs of testified to Congress begging for regulation

Just delete the prompt in the DOM inspector and you don't actually have to agree to it.

I mean, none of the frontier labs are beacons of ethics and collective progress. They all want to corner "the market" and pump the riches to their own pockets.

The discourse is a result of their behavior. Not the opposite.

Do Chinese labs actually do things beyond distilling other models?

Agent ability is far outpacing alignment though

Please don't do this here. You may not owe $CEO better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Let me rewrite it for you:

We must not trust anything coming out of these CEOs, since they have a history of lying, and I don't for a second believe that they have our well-being at heart.