Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

This is actually the only way that what Anthropic is alleging would make any kind of sense. And, as a matter of fact, is exactly what every enterprise does to train models.

This kerfuffle should be interesting to watch.

But, as always, everyone (in the US) should fully download all the Chinese models while you can. I suspect this may be the "Phantom Menace" they use to render illegal our use of Chinese AI tech just as they've rendered illegal our use of Chinese cars. Only difference is, we peasants may need the Chinese AI tech to have any chance of competing with Big Tech in the future.

And even with the Chinese tech, as Big Tech spreads their AI out into more and more niche areas, we'll likely still not be able to build startups that can compete with them.

It's just that without Chinese AI tech, we'll have no chance at all.

Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way.

I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility.

Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless.

So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function,

   f(text) -> (text_transform)

According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function.

Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product.

I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process;

Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.

Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered)

You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google.

You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians.

It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out.

And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos."

Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please."

Just saying.

/Anthropic-probably