Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wongarsu 38 days ago
There are three things happening simultaneously: 1st a new model, codenamed "Mythos", 2nd a lightweight harness built for finding vulnerabilities, and 3rd a push by Anthropic to collaborate with various Open Source projects and companies to use 1 and 2 to find vulnerabilities

We know that the combination of all three results in finding lots of security vulnerabilities. That's what Mozilla is talking about. The quote from the curl story states that just 2 and 3, but with just regular SotA models, would have produced very similar results

Which is really the crux of all this hype around Mythos: would the results really be different if they used Claude Opus instead of Claude Mythos? How much is the model, how much the harness, and how much is just because Anthropic is running a big campaign systematically trying to find vulnerabilities?

1 comments

Not to discredit anything that was said in any particular blog post.

Folks also need to remember that a lot of blog posts are written by engineers or managers that have their own agendas and careers and often external blog posts can be a form of self marketing or idea marketing that an engineer or director has been pushing internally.

I have no idea if this happened in mozilla's case but the person that wrote it seemed to talk about the their own internal harness / fuzz testing framework quite a bit, and I imagine it was probably a big part of that person's scope / accomplishments and will probably show up at their end of year review and on their resume.

Also, the people at Mozilla who helped achieve a highly visible collaboration with the hottest AI company in the zeitgeist that included a lot of expensive data center time to harden their flagship product are definitely going to be happy/excited/proud about pulling it off successfully.

There's a lot of kneejerk "so you're accusing Mozilla of a conspiracy to boost Anthropic?" which is an overly simplistic lens. Particularly when it involves groups of individual humans with different motivations and emotional investment in their own contributions to the collaboration.

Okay so supposing everybody is acting in a benign manner, following their incentives and passions, not meaning to mislead anybody. Do you think that this results in writing a misleading blog post? Because the blog post makes Mythos out to be a big friggin deal. (It had certainly convinced me).