Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jb_briant | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jb_briant

Step 1: claim you created a tool so dangerous you can't release it

Step2: offer to test it, but only for the biggest companies in the world

Step 3: onboard those big players on your tooling and product

Step 4: profit

This is genius.

View on HN

And all you have to do is demonstrate unique value during the pilot phase!

Err... wait... that was already the hard part... hmm

Genius marketing move doesn't mean there is no value.

It means than even if the value you offer is similar as your competitors, you are the one conquering the market.

That's the only way to not becoming a commodity.

With trillion dollars at stake they can hire best of best in sales and marketing. And unlike some hardcore hackers who may have ethics that does not always move in direction of more money. Sales and marketing people are highly motivated for opportunities to make more money.

Our game is to craft shit, their game is to sell shit. You gotta respect the different tastes in the nature!

Yeah, Companies to buy shit and their employees to eat shit. Lion king would say it is great circle of life.

Here spoke the wise man!

Don't you understand, if they really did do the <ai magic> they don't need to hire anyone, IT SELLS ITSELF

It’s true that providing security services to so many organizations will likely put them in a position to earn lots of money. It makes them an essential service, sort of like what happened with Cloudflare and denial-of-service attacks. (There are competitors, but they’re the first company people think of.)

But I think that downplays the importance of having a good product. If the product didn’t work, this would be a good way to lose trust with a lot of organizations in a hurry.

This is a circular economy that makes everyone look good. Almost all of these enterprise companies are sitting on top of so much of tech debt that in any realistic scenario they cant really patch vulnerabilities if they are even in double digits. A lot of these companies would not even let their valuable enough code to be ingested by LLM's.

At this phase no company would risk their brand by calling the product as ineffective. The big players are in it together and small ones have no option but to play along.

Nevertheless collecting the historical wisdom and running it at machine scale does have a lot of benefits for sure. The only question is the signal to noise ratio, machine is doing what humans did, just at a multiplier speed and with a lot more context than what a normal human can hold.

Yeah and apparently, Mythos is pretty effective at finding critical issues. So it seams to be a good product served with a genius offer. Anthropic founding engineers are already comfortable, they will end rich.

They did produce great value, claude code and opus 4.5 are a singularity in software engineering.

The job we practiced for decades simply doesn't exist anymore.

Yes, it flips it from “don’t use a remote LLM on our code because security” to “we must run an LLM on our code because security.”

These companies are surely already onboarded…? They claim like 10k verified and high severity CVEs. Would you have preferred they just rolled it out like another opus update? You wouldn’t be insinuating in that situation that they were careless and reckless? They risk missing a boatload of revenue if openAI front runs them for a public launch. In what world is this some sort of scam??

Where did I use the word scam?

Marketing move doesn't mean scam. It describe the ability to sell people over a narrative and surpassing your competitor in market share. And that's exactly what is happening.

My post is a "tribute" to the efficiency of Anthropic's communication. I never complained about anything, nor calling it a scam, nor saying they should have released mythos to the public instead of rolling it out to a selected cohort.

You tried to expand my words to make me say something I didn't, because my post wasn't giving you a clear conclusion of my opinion regarding their private release.

Ok you’re totally right, I read this as a cynical “this is all marketing” post ==> a scammy connotation. Without that read, your points are fairly valid, but are you still implying this is all a pure marketing tactic? If so I would still argue against that as a necessity but surely marketing could be heavily involved. But still: this could easily be a footgun. OpenAI will easily release the same model and now that Anthropic has taken the initiative to do a slower more contained rollout they wouldn’t need to do any of that. So from a business perspective I would still argue this whole glasswing initiative would make their sales and marketing department pretty nervous. I mean in a second-order branding sense sure this plays into the “we are ethical” ethos but it hardly seems worth the risk

I don't have enough elements to conclude if the world would collapse if Mythos was released publicly without Glasswing.

Nor publicly or in my internal reasoning. I rarely conclude without proof or very intense and clear intuition.

From a strategic PoV it makes sense to check if their model is dangerous, I wouldn't want to have my brand name associated with "NK hacker team find zero day in all linux servers of the web and ..."

Seems like they're not even close to step 4.

And put Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder, sitting next to Pope Leo XIV presenting his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, at the Vatican.

>can't release it

can't release it the plebs

Unsure about that, opus was already insanely good and we got it for a fractional cost via subscriptions.

They want the plebs, they want the mass.

I don't think so bro; anthropic wants B2B cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com