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Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

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Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They yell "China is stealing our tech!" but want us to look away when they pirate everything ever created for their model training...

Anthropic does seem to have more ethical practices on that than most companies in this space, purchasing and scanning physical books rather than pirating them as Meta and OpenAI did. However, books are cheap, and I’m unsure of their wider practices. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

They pirated wholesale as well. Hence the billion dollar settlement.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#232
post #210
post #131

The below amendment from the anthropic blog page is telling. Edited November 14 2025: Added an additional hyperlink to the full report in the initial section Corrected an error about the speed of the attack: not "thousands of requests per second" but "thousands of requests, often multiple per second"

> The operational tempo achieved proves the use of an autonomous model rather than interactive assistance. Peak activity included thousands of requests, representing sustained request rates of multiple operations per second. The assumption that no human could ever (program a computer to) do multiple things per second, nor have their code do different things depending on the result of the previous request is... intere…

Great point, it might be just pure ignorance. Even OSS pentesting tooling such as metasploitable have great capabilities. I see how LLM could be leveraged to build custom modules on top of those tools or how can you add basic LLM “decision” making, but this is just another additive tool in the chain.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#233
Hmm seems their play is to encourage security to experiment with AI e.g. Claude etc. Google's play seems to be spend 30 billion+ for Wiz and sell both the poison (AI) and the cure (Wiz security services). Interesting business models, reminds me of when CVS would sell cigarettes.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite perception: they’re the only company in the space that seems to have a clue what responsible software engineering is. Gemini Code and Cursor both did such a poor job sandboxing their agents that the exploits sound like punchlines, while Microsoft doesn’t even try with Copilot Agentic. Countless Cursor bugs have been fixed with obviously vibe-coded fake solutions (you can see if you poke into code…

I suggest spending some time with Codex. Claude likes to hack objectives, it's really messy and it'll run off sometimes without a clear idea of what you want or how a project works. That is all fine when you're a non-technical person vibe coding a demo, but it really kills the product when you're working on hard tasks in a large codebase.

Codex is the one I haven’t really tried, I’ll have to check it out.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#238
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know anything about him, but if he is running a department at Meta, he as at the very least a political genius and a teenage data labeller

[flagged]

> They hired a teenager to run one of their departments

Except they didn’t. The person in question was 28 when they hired him.

He was a teenager when he cofounded the company that was acquired for thirty billion dollars. But the taste of those really sour grapes must be hard to deal with.

Re: Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know anything about him, but if he is running a department at Meta, he as at the very least a political genius and a teenage data labeller

Presumably this is all referring to Alexander Wang, who's 28 now. The data-labeling company he co-founded, Scale AI, was acquired by Meta at a valuation of nearly $30 billion. But I suppose the criticism is that he doesn't have deep AI model research credentials. Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.

> how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.

For running an AI lab? a lot. Put it this way, part of the reason that Meta has squandered its lead is because it decided to fill it's genAI dept (pre wang) with non-ML people.

Now thats fine, if they had decent product design and clear road map as to the products they want to release.

but no, they are just learning ML as they go, coming up with bullshit ideas as they go and seeing what sticks.

But, where it gets worse, is they take the FAIR team and pass them around like a soiled blanket: "You're a team that is pushing the boundaries in research, but also you need stop doing that and work on this chatbot that pretends to be a black gay single mother"

All the while you have a sister department, RL-L run by Abrash, who lets you actually do real research.

Which means most of FAIR have fucked off to somewhere less stressful, and more concentrated on actually doing research, rather than posting about how you're doing research.

Wangs misteps are numerous, the biggest one is re-platforming the training system. Thats a two year project right there, for no gain. It also force forks you from the rest of the ML teams. Given how long it took to move to MAST from fblearner, its going be a long slog. And thats before you tackle increasing GPU efficiency.

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