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Comment by glub | Hacker News Reader

Dario, Sam, and Elon are all on the same page on this.

So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.

I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky, so what could the other possible motives be, based on what we know?

OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.

xAI is tracking behind, and whatever regulation it may be that paces the frontier, Musk is less likely to be affected by it. Therefore xAI should be pro-regulation that stiffles his competition and gives him time to catch up.

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> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing

I'm shocked anyone could conclude this. This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI (I know many competent programmers/researchers who do this now). Progress in math has just been insane. An internal model at OAI just resolved one of the most celebrated open problems in mathematics. If anything, progress has accelerated.

> This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI

This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year. We've mostly stayed there since then.

Saying that more people started doing it isn't indicative of significant improvement. Some people just started doing it later.

I can't speak about math because I haven't used AI for that application, but I know that there hasn't been any significant advancement in coding in this year on base models. There has been more RL work, more harness work, more tools, they all expanded some capabilities like cyber or orchestration or tool use, but raw intelligence of base models is no longer where the main focus is.

> This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year.

I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. Opus 4.5 needed a lot of handholding not to work itself into a corner pretty quickly. Fable I basically never need to correct, and I've most become a data source.

What are you talking about - I feel like we’re living in parallel realities. If I had to go back to opus 4.5 tomorrow I’d be hugely upset and significantly slowed down

I'm not. Yes we normalized 1m context window and models tend to hallucinate less.

But models have been somewhat stagnant since Opus 4.6/7.

And in some regards there were even regressions like Claudeisms that are load bearing.

Yes these guys are completely delusional.

2 years ago a model could barely solve the AMC, 1 year ago it got IMO gold, and this year models have solved multiple millenium problems.

Even 1 year ago ai code was just unusable (claude code only became available 1.5 years ago!) and now basically everyone I know from independent shops all the way to faang and anthropic/openai themselves exclusively use some AI agent to code.

Why does HN continue to delude itself that "models are not improving?" Maybe for the simple things they care about its "roughly the same," but they are _clearly_ improving.

Waitwaitwait multiple millennium problems? What was the other one???

Increasing a bound on the fraction of Reimann zeros on the critical line doesn't count; even Anthropic says they don't think this line of work will lead to a solution.

Navier Stokes, and _allegedly_ the Hodge Conjecture and Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer.

> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing

Have they? That seems like quite a claim given the last 6 months, particularly for cybersecurity.

Many claims but no clear evidence that they actually find significantly more severe issues compared to open models.

Open models and agents can't be trusted without handholding. Astra can one-shot six months of work. Years of work, even.

OpenAI just solved Navier-Stokes.

Seems like the US is on a takeoff ramp to me.

Here are the cope points

1. Navier Stokes was plagiarism

2. All benchmarks were misleading wrong and incorrect

3. All other mathematical advances were again hype

4. HF incident was marketting ploy jointly coordinated by HF, METR and OpenAI (and also Anthropic)

5. Anthropic's HF like incident was again a marketing ploy [1]

Nothing ever happens. This whole thing is a scam. Everything is done to fool you and you have fallen for it. Congrats.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/investigating-incidents-c...

> Navier Stokes was plagiarism

_of work that was aided/accelerated by AI!_

Clearly no one here has heard of Occams Razor before :P

Tell me you haven't tried letting Astra go without telling me.

Astra can confidently one-shot 500k lines of slop, with 800k lines of tests covering it, without testing a single intended product requirement, and none of it actually working.

All models require hand holding. Fable and Astra are no exceptions. The difference is only in the amount of hand holding required, and there's essentially no gap here anymore between American and Chinese models.

I only use Chinese models sparingly because American models are so much cheaper with subscriptions, that it doesn't make economic sense to not use them. If/when that changes, I could simply route to cheapest model that's available at the moment and I wouldn't notice much difference in most applications.

The attention is shifting towards RL, harnesses, and memory systems from the pretrains of more intelligent and capable base models. So extracting additional capabilities from what we already have.

That is a much easier catch up game. GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek flash 4.1 also demonstrate significant jump in cyber capabilities. So yeah, it is a slowdown in the place where it matters. RL has been around for ages, there's no moat there if you already have a good enough pretrain.

> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.

This is obviously untrue… do you use any of them?

This line will keep repeating because it is necessary for the narrative:

   AI in general is just hype and unprofitable and all these companies are playing marketing tricks before the IPO after which they will cash out and let the economy crash.

This is legit what a lot of people think. To continue this narrative, they have to keep up the charade of "things are not improving".

Add in a heaping dash of anti-american sentiment, and you will get the truth behind the pessimistic commentary.

Downplaying the latest models capabilities is frankly insane considering what we’ve seen what OpenAI’s models have done without safeguards. That wasn’t possible before this latest generation.

Anthropic could serve Opus 4.5 from a year ago under opus:latest and most heavy users would probably have no idea. Some of them would probably even prefer it.

Yes, I do use them, quite heavily. The only difference at this point is in benchmarks that can't be trusted (see: artificial analysis on Astra), or in the way models communicate.

Most gains are now from RL, which for some reason is hyperfocused on improving cyber capabilities, and harnesses. Raw intelligence gains of base models is absolutely slowing down.

> OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.

What is going on in this thread?

Are these even real comments?

While I strongly agree on the need to pace the frontier, I do think there are reasonable arguments that could be made against it.

Non of those are being made here though. It's just speculation that the CEOs of the fastest growing companies in the world are somehow obsessed with regulatory capture to maintain their lead, and have been playing the long game by talking AI risk for 10+ years so that when they become the CEOs of leading AI companies they can push for regulatory capture.

Perhaps they're all just genuinely concerned?

What would regulatory capture even give them? Who are they so worried will compete with them? Google, Mistral? Even if it's Chinese AI labs, it seems odd for anyone in the West to be opposed to any regulation that would slow them.

So assuming they are obsessed with regulatory capture – what's the argument for why they would want it?

They may be genuinely concerned, but that's beside the point. You may think a technology holds too much power for someone to wield it, and therefore come to conclusion that you, the benevolent, the fluffy, the unicorn, with your 3 unicorn friends are the ONLY ones in the world of 8 billion people that are responsible enough to hold it.

Even though I don't think Dario is such a person, because unlike their LLMs, I do have a working memory, I'm going to play the ball and assume he is, indeed, an angel brought down by none other than God himself.

Why should CEO of a for-profit company be the dictator (pun intended) of which models I am allowed or not allowed to use, and in which way? Why should Dario have any say in what DeepSeek can or can not publish or whom they can serve?

> What would regulatory capture even give them? Who are they so worried will compete with them? Google, Mistral? Even if it's Chinese AI labs, it seems odd for anyone in the West to be opposed to any regulation that would slow them.

I am opposed to it. Why would I be opposed to open weight models? Why would anyone be opposed to open weight models or more competition other than the ones that get their bottom lines hurt by it? The reason why you still have reasonably inexpensive access to western AI models is because China has been breathing down their necks. Otherwise, you'd be paying a whole lot more money per token were it just these 3 running the show.

If you want to limit the power of companies you need regulation...

I agree with you that we can't allow a handful of people to hold this power themselves, so what are you arguing for here? That the answer is to just leave AI labs to carry on as they are?

The government should be ensuring that the technology is being developed with caution, but since the government seems to have no interest in that, this is at least better than nothing.

Your solution of giving everyone access to super intelligence is absurd. A good guy with super intelligence isn't going to protect you from the bad guy with super intelligence. If someone uses it to poison your water supply with a bioweapon or to take out power stations, you and your family will be dead long before your super intelligence hacks together plan to stop it.

> That the answer is to just leave AI labs to carry on as they are?

Yes, and no. I do not think there's a need for special treatment of LLMs. But the labs certainly shouldn't be allowed to go around hacking things on the internet when they could have prevented it by simply taking time to ensure sandboxes they run test models in are given more than a quick look by a junior engineer to configure.

But the interesting thing is that there are laws that already govern this. They're just, for some reason, are not applied to Anthropic and OpenAI. Cyber crime is already punishable, and both labs did, in fact, commit cyber crimes. Did the existing regulations fail? No, the enforcement did.

The same goes for bioweapons. Any chemistry undergrad that can read an openly available paper can manufacture insane things with just common household ingredients, they do not need LLMs for that. This is a made up scenario with no evidence whatsoever to support it. There are millions of people that could poison your water supply today, without ever touching an LLM.

If we're afraid of LLMs turning into superintelligence, and we think superintelligence shouldn't be available to anyone at all, then we must all agree not on pacing the frontier, but just stopping any and all research into this. And that's not going to happen.

> So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here. I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky,[...]

And yet, they historically did agree on the existence of AI risk, since before OpenAI was even founded.

Yeah, this 100% looks like an effort to use fear to create a regulatory moat.

"So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all"

Exactly how does a CPU kill 8 odd billion people? Even if they got hold of the weapons to wipe out a few billion, surely the remain billions would just turn off the data centres?

Bioweapons, trivially. All it would need to do is convince one person who works in a lab, possibly under the guise of benign intent.

Or... something so far outside of the box that we'd have about as much understanding of it as a baboon does a gun.

Chemist here, what bioweapon do you know of that can wipe out 8 billion people before anyone can do something about it? Never mind one release by a single person. It's really not 'trivial' to slaughter millions of people.

Such a bioweapon (probably) doesn't exist yet, but that doesn't mean it's impossible in principle. It's "trivial" in the sense that it's easy to _imagine_ such a thing... but a superintelligence is by definition much much smarter than humans, so whatever it comes up with will likely be very surprising to us.

Let's not forget that the competitive race happened because of them. Most of the initial AI research from the past decade started with Google Deepmind. Elon Musk was invited for a preview of it and ended up spinning up OpenAI when Demis turned down his investment offer. Dario was originally at OpenAI and left to start Anthropic.

This seems like a case of "save me from my own mistakes/ambition"

Sure, but at this point it's "save _all of us_ from my mistakes/ambition". It doesn't really matter how it started, we still need to escape the trap.

Which is it? Would the regulations slow down competitors or let them catch up, or are you contending it would let American competitors catch up but Chinese ones not?

> So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all

Yes. Basically everyone here is dismissing this possibility. We shouldn’t.

> there's some other motives at play here.

I mean it is literally economy 101: some capitalists getting on the top using free market, and then try to use government to remove free market so their top position were secured from any competitors.

Exactly. Textbook definition of “Crony Capitalism”. Which isn’t actually capitalism at that point.

> So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.

Duh! It’s called collusion. They want to try and hoard the technology for themselves if possible!

Yet Musk consistently opposes AI regulation - https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/elon-musk-criticizes-ai-re... - even though it might help him.

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