[layla5alive]

https://archive.ph/NEwVz

"However, these inference optimizations, which rival Anthropic refers to as “compute multipliers,” are a big focus for all the labs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been publicly talking about the concept since at least mid-2023, when he said on a podcast that the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them. (Compute multipliers can also refer to efficiency optimizations in the model-training phase.)"

Yes, on a world with finite resources where your industry is singlehandedly siphoning ALL THE RESOURCES - hoard general efficiency optimizations and treat them as trade secrets - winning is all that matters, normal people and other species and the planet be damned.

Everything I hear about Dario these days makes me like him less and less. He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! I guess all the cycles are compressing as we approach the singularity..

[schnitzelstoat]

It gives them a massive advantage because they can cut the cost per token by a lot and eat Anthropic's market share.

In what universe is any company going to give that advantage away?

In any case if they take away a lot of market share it's basically the same in the end - most people will be using these optimisations.

[alightsoul]

Deepseek gave it away with R1. They did it again with V4 and DSpark. You don't use it because it's Chinese

[schnitzelstoat]

I'm not American so I don't really care if it's Chinese or not.

But at work I can only use the approved Enterprise Plans we have and we only have those with Anthropic and OpenAI.

[pea]

The shift may come when your blessed cloud platform provides competitive enterprise-ready hosting of the oss models

[alightsoul]

Companies and people worldwide just use whatever Americans use, because they read English but can't write it. Americans don't use Chinese models because they're Chinese.

[nijave]

And Chinese don't use American models because they're American. What's your point?

[kzrdude]

It's available from opencode (non-chinese hosting), additionally deepseek v4-flash is available with rate limits of course, for free, there.

[razodactyl]

Not sure I know where I fall regarding your point: Yes to trade secrets, but also science and AI should be for the good of all.

OpenAI seems to be trading roles back with Anthropic becoming misanthropic. I hope they both start heading in the direction of how the AI field was prior to LLMs.

Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.

[georgemcbay]

> Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.

Of all the things to never happen, this is never going to happen the most.

That train left the station for good once hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars were involved.

On the bright side, in the long run I suspect the vast majority of the value of AI will not be captured by the model making labs and the vast investments in them are going to implode, so...

[fragmede]

implode, how?

[reinitctxoffset]

They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment, they just want to drive the value of LLM training and inference to zero because we banked the market on it being arbitrarily high margin forever. China was like hold my beer.

They have a staggering surplus of grid capacity and can bring more online without any difficulty. We couldn't get a serious nuclear project done if Jeffrey Epstein was offering private flights to the ribbon cutting.

In the United States at any given time more than half of the FLOPs are badly misallocated, Meta has like, a double digit percentage of the total capacity going down the drain every day and has for years. That's a conspicuous example but on OpenRouter rankings it's rare to see more than one or two American vendors in the top 10, sometimes the top 20. But 3rd, 4th, and 5th place are all merrily burning half the compute duplicating effort and missing key innovations because we stopped publishing real results. In China if DeepSeek makes a breakthrough it's at Zhupai and Moonshot and MiniMax and MiMo and Qwen that week.

Our only lever, export restrictions, seems to do nothing but breed multiply antibiotic resistant super hackers who just get more efficient and immediately propagate all of those efficiencies to the rest of the Chinese AI industry.

At the beginning of 2026 there was one Chinese lab with a model that had any real relevance fielding modern tool users. Today in July there are like, eight lagging the absolute frontier by maybe 3-6 months. Barring some massive bend in some curve 3-4 of the top 5 and 6-8 of the top 10 will be Chinese and open weight by January.

The great irony in all of this is that our current playbook is straight out of the 1960s USSR, and the PRC's current playbook is straight out of 1960s USA. We're the ones with the opaque decision making and gross resource misallocation driven by the personal agendas of a shadowy cabal of frenemies wired back channel into government in the form of the individuals rather than the offices. They're the ones with a thriving marketplace of ideas powered by robust public/private partnership and a paved path running bidirectionally to the university system.

It's going to implode because the Kruschev system does. Theirs is going to thrive because the Kennedy system puts a man on the moon before the decade is out.

[maxglute]

>full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment

There's no evidence of this, the parsimonious explanation is PRC AI, by virtue of being sanctioned, simply is not able to run magnitude more expensive compute model, and even if they could, they don't have the $$$ or market cap to do so. So they optimize and involute margins like they do in everything, and US misallocated expensive flops because the entire industry has been financially engineered for phat margins along the entire producer supply chain is just cherry on cake. Like wipe out the 50%+ margins from toolmakers, fabs, gpu/memory/data center components to some reasonable level and US is overpaying for tokens by a stupid multiplier on top of actual compute misallocation due to incompetent infra. Maybe PRC AI has unsound economics, but it's structurally simply not able to misallocate as much as US who will find a way to financialize compute to point of absurdity.

[satvikpendem]

The US can just ban Chinese weights being used in US companies.

[reinitctxoffset]

If the Trump administration decides to annoint Altman and Amodei in defiance of market forces it will rapidly discover that it no longer has the sovereign bond auction pricing power to prop them up. This isn't 1998: the Treasury has taken five major body blows in the last 25 years, the world's energy markets, maritime insurance regimes, electronic payments rails, and moral authority in places like the UN Security Council are effectively bifurcated. Oil and money and data and people just flow around the United States now. Canada's sovereign debt yields tank harder when the market is spooked, that's the North American flight to quality.

The administration could probably put some serious friction on open weight model use in the Fortune 500 for a little while, but the opposition never got such a gift right before a squeaker midterm. And outside of major enterprises with puckered ass compliance departments? Not a chance. It's popular around here to forget Uber and AirBnB and yes, OpenAI and Anthropic all got their start flagrantly breaking the law and grew lawyers and lobbyists faster than anyone could enforce it. And this time everyone from the DNC to the EFF would be holding hands wearing "Save The Models" t-shirts. Not even NVIDIA is remotely pretending they're anything but all in on GLM 5.2, they had an NVFP4 quant up by the time most people read the blog post.

And the Trump Administration isn't exactly enamored of Comrade Amodei at the moment, being as they're appealing the lawsuit Anthropic brought against the Pentagon during a shooting war.

Forcing the American proprietary AI megalab financing event was our fiscal Ukraine Special Military Operation, the market is calling the bluff and neither the capital markets nor the Federal Reserve has the dry powder to absorb this one.

The Treasury auctions will flat not clear in an orderly way. We can't raise 2-4 trillion dollars on a dime in 2026 and if CoreWeave turns out, as many suspect, to be Patient Zero? It would be that big a hole.

We play by the same rules as everyone else now. I hope we regard it as being worth it, but I fear we will not.

[alightsoul]

There's no need for a ban. There's already no use at all of Chinese models in the US simply because they're Chinese.

[rightbyte]

> They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care

There is nothing to support this. You get cheap Deepseek tokens by foreign providers too.

It is the same thing with automakers. They complain about not being able to only make luxuary cars with high profits with BYD raining on their parade and blaming the Chinese gov.

[alightsoul]

i really hope it's just what Deepseek V4 does. Deepseek V4 is very cheap and highly performant

OpenAI tried to pull off the same trade secret thing with RL when they announced o1 and o3, aka "Compute time scaling". Then Deepseek revealed it with Deepseek R1.

Could also be something like Deepseek DSpark. Or using diffusion like DiffusionGemma as a draft model. The timing between the release of those, and this article, makes me think its maybe one or both of those things

[cyanydeez]

deep down, i suspect they're all just drafting on implementations to llamacpp.

[bloppe]

I agree that Dario is pretty annoying, but I think the "tech villain" archetype is essentially survivorship bias. The tech leaders who don't act that way are not nearly as visible because they're not nearly as successful.

[alightsoul]

How are the Chinese doing it then? It's not a zero sum game is it?

[solenoid0937]

HN is just a massive Anthropic hate fest now, probably funded/manipulated by OAI's $8B PR budget.

OP phrases it as a bad thing that Dario is keeping compute multipliers to Anthropic. How naive can one be? Compute multipliers are the whole business. Those are the trade secrets every lab is built on. It is the alpha of the business. How does protecting this make Dario evil?

This website is getting out of hand with the uninformed hot takes. I wish when HN was still people that knew what they were talking about.

[FergusArgyll]

Hey! I'm an on-again-off-again Anthropic hater and I may be guilty of uninformed hot takes but I'm not paid for by OpenAI[0]

People have different opinions than you, it happens..

[0] @sama if you're reading this we can fix that...

[bloppe]

I'm saying I would do the same thing if I were Dario. I don't think he's evil. I just think his hero complex is annoying.

[petesergeant]

I'm not as conspiratorial as you, but it does seem the tide of opinion here is turning against Amodei, for no particularly obvious external reason. At the same time, there does seem to be at least some evidence of adversarial attempts to oppose data-centers by America's competitors.

[solenoid0937]

At my company we are pretty certain that a lot of datacenter opposition is being instrumented and funded by the PRC.

AI is a bid for control of all humanity. The first to superintelligence owns our future. I'd say it's okay to be a bit suspicious or conspiratorial of anti-AI/anti-lab narratives.

[layla5alive]

So you think we should be suspicious of anti-AI narratives, but not of.. overt race by corporations to "control all of humanity" ?!?

[satvikpendem]

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[versteegen]

Amusing, this is the first time I've seen someone get flagged for quoting the guidelines.

[satvikpendem]

I am vindicated.

[KronisLV]

> the company limits “the number of people who are aware of a given compute multiplier” because it could give other AI labs a leg up if they were to be able to replicate them.

I wonder if that makes sense if the orgs within the industry are starting to shift their mindset towards "Tokens are expensive, we should use AI less." which feels like an existential threat to the status quo, if those AI providers can't find ways to keep costs affordable for their clients. Otherwise those orgs would just be using GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek V4 Pro but it seems like what they're doing instead is trying to use AI just less, period.

[stingraycharles]

Ok I’m not sure I follow your point here. Isn’t all that he’s saying that if they find some optimization techniques, that gives them an edge? And that makes sense?

How is this suddenly evidence of him being a villain?

[alightsoul]

The evidence is that unlike Deepseek he does not publish his compute multipliers. Under that argument Deepseek should not publish any of their research either.

[estearum]

DeepSeek is acting in accordance with their incentives, just like Anthropic is

[stingraycharles]

But Deepseek has a very different way of operating their business as the underdog. They also publish their models as open weight, which Anthropic also doesn’t do.

I don’t think this makes Anthropic a villain?

[solenoid0937]

It has got to be one of the most insane takes I've read on HN, which to be fair has been trending towards "unhinged" when it comes to Anthropic and AI safety.

Compute multipliers are like a quant firm's trading algorithms. They're the crown jewels, the whole alpha of the lab. If you leak them, the lab dies.

Protecting them does not make Dario a villain, it's literally his job. It's also Sam's job, Denis's job, Mira's job, etc. Every lab guards these multipliers closely because they represent the entire worth of the lab.

[Der_Einzige]

The fact that they don’t release model weights for free to download on huggingface means that Sam, Mira, Dario, etc are ontologically evil and may they all reincarnate as either durian fruits or cockroaches, ideally as durian fruit infested with cockroaches…

[stingraycharles]

Is this a serious take or sarcasm?

[solenoid0937]

Sometimes you just gonna channel your inner Karp

[Der_Einzige]

I’m dead serious.

[alightsoul]

So how can Deepseek publish them without killing themselves?

[estearum]

Because they are a state-owned enterprise tasked with destroying the aforementioned alpha of private American labs...?

[alightsoul]

oh here we go again saying everything in china is done by the state. it's not a democracy but they're not the soviet union either. if that were true, why don't they have just one model initiative instead of several?

[estearum]

Oh yeah that's a good point. In that case, this Chinese hedge fund is choosing to sink billions of dollars in R&D alongside vast opportunity cost in order to create models and release them for free because umm... they're just that nice!

No wonder you're confused about DeepSeek when you have a fairly obvious explanation provided to you, and your response is "it's unrealistic to think the Chinese Communist Party is behaving like communists."

> if that were true, why don't they have just one model initiative instead of several?

Because value exists at several layers of the product hierarchy? I.e. for the exact same reason that the for-profit labs don't have just one model initiative?

[solenoid0937]

Their alpha has been discovered by the other labs. If they took the lead they obviously would not give that up freely.

[alecco]

And Anthropic sure reads and applies all the open research.

This 2023 thread about this issue is prescient: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11sboh1/d_... (just add Anthropic to OpenAI)

[llelouch]

Dario tells the truth. If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense. They are not bs'ing about that. Also I think most people just read headlines or 10 second clips and make false extrapolations from there.

(BTW Anthropic only exists because Sam Altman is a liar, Dario admitted this.)

[nmfisher]

> If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense.

Except for, you know, all the outside investors and the forthcoming IPO.

[adahn]

A no-investment policy would take them off the scene entirely. Essentially handing over the reins to OpenAI, Google, and others. Their position is something close to "if I don't do it, someone worse will".

Related: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-wor...

There's a more nuanced discussion that could be had about how to balance relevance with outside influence. But at a foundational level it should be acknowledged that the tradeoff exists, and that receiving outside investment can't alone be seen as evidence of corruption.

Besides that, there's more that can be said about other things like their corporate structure or the degree to which they accelerated the AI race.

[bloppe]

"if I don't do it, someone worse will"

Of course that's what Dario thinks because that's what every tech CEO thinks. Dario, Sam, Sundar, probably many Chinese CEOs as well. It's what everyone thinks. That's why they're competing so fiercely with one another. That's why they basically make all the same decisions. That's why we need properly open source AI.

[adahn]

It's hard to be certain what each individual thinks. We can do our best to judge based on what they each say and do. And there are significant differences in what each of these individuals have chosen to say and do over the years. The info available to the public makes it seem a lot like Dario's motivations & priorities differ from those of Sam and others.

This doesn't seem like the right place to spend my time litigating that point to its fullest extent (no-one here is doing that). But there's plenty of relevant info surrounding eg.:

* The New Yorker article on Altman [1]

* The story behind Anthropic's founding

* Various efforts to influence government policy (a16z policies and contributors [2], Trump's inauguration donors [3], giving Trump credit for AI infrastructure [4], Dario's op-eds [5])

1: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

2: https://a16z.com/portfolio/

3: https://www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-inauguration-donors

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe11mJ8mCHU

5: https://darioamodei.com/

[datakan]

What they think is irrelevant. What they do is

[solenoid0937]

Open source AI fails first contact with sufficiently-intelligent-as-to-be-dangerous AI.

The day Mythos class models are open sourced will not be a good day. I don't think you understand the impact that will have on the world and on cyber defenders everywhere. It will be pure chaos.

Even if you don't think Mythos-class is the bar, open source has to stop at some point, you don't hand everyone a superweapon.

[bloppe]

Every single one of those sentences is highly dubious. Cyber-defenders would be pretty jazzed about having easier access to Mythos-class models. Cyber-defense is easier with better tools.

[Der_Einzige]

This line of thinking is ontologically evil, life denying, and it and its believers should be rejected and fought with extreme prejudice.

[alightsoul]

Oh remember when the same was said about GPT-2? It will actually force cyber security to be taken seriously instead of just bureaucracy

[solenoid0937]

You expect AGI to be built without additional investor money?

[bigyabai]

> He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path!

What kind of rosy-eyed chump believes in the "tech leader with scruples" bullshit? It always lies.

Did some people just ignore Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook's sociopathy, somehow? Did anyone buy into their "privacy is a human right" nonsense?

[lern_too_spel]

Zuckerberg never had scruples, and everyone knew that from the start.

[bigyabai]

I thought this stuff was common knowledge. I didn't expect to make people angry by insinuating that Nadella, Cook and Pichai are also socipaths, but I guess we have a bit further to fall before people learn the lesson.

[senordevnyc]

I find this kind of cynicism fascinating tbh. On the one hand, it seems so relatable in some ways, because there is something uncomfortable about being seen as naive, in a way that being seen as cynical or negative doesn't seem to carry. I guess it's just self-protective, almost like some kind of perverse Pascal's wager: it's better to think everyone is horrible and be wrong than to think the opposite and be taken advantage of?

The thing I can't quite square is that it doesn't really fit my lived experience. I have known sincere, genuine people in the types of positions that I'm sure someone like you would declare to be sociopathic.

But beyond that, I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain. Why couldn't someone like Dario (or even Altman, gasp) be sincere? Because if he is, it does seem like a lot of the moves he's made would make sense given his worldview.

But if you assume he's just a villain, then you can twist any of those moves to just be further evidence of that which you already believe.

I don't know, I just find cynicism interesting, and a little sad.

[kouteiheika]

> But if you assume he's just a villain

You don't have to assume anything. A true "good guy" doesn't openly say that he's fine with autonomous, AI-powered weapons being used against me, and mass surveillance applied to me and my family just because I don't live in the US. A true "good guy" doesn't say "privacy is a human right", and then immediately (and completely) bend the knee to an authoritarian government on this issue.

[user43928]

OpenAI's agreement with the Pentagon was "No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems".

And about the mass surveillance, I don't see why the military should not use AI to do surveillance abroad.

[layla5alive]

Do you see a problem with imperialism?

[chillfox]

Maybe because it will make people abroad like you less and that has flow-on effects, mostly economic.

[nl]

I think that applies to military involvement abroad generally.

If you are dropping bombs on someone I'm unconvinced the use of AI will make them like you more or less.

[solenoid0937]

It's a lot easier to sound smart on the internet if you're a bitter cynic.

Lots of nerds for some reason have made cynicism a personality trait. They think optimism/honesty is hopelessly naive, therefor cynicism is the correct default.

[Supermancho]

> Lots of nerds for some reason have made cynicism a personality trait. They think optimism/honesty is hopelessly naive, therefor cynicism is the correct default.

It is the result of experience. Working with and creating systems (even embarrassingly simple ones), then seeing them fail in a myriad of ways more often than succeeding, colors your expectations about throwing humans into the mix.

Children learn to lie as part of their natural development, but do not always externalize that until faced with media (Airheads candy commercial or equivalent). Either way, honesty is expected as a default for utility and not an expectation in leveraging goals.

[DenisM]

It stops being interesting, or even sad, after a while. People get stuck in all kinds of places, mentally. Some get unstuck eventually. It’s only sad if you have come to a counter factual belief that it could have gone better.

I went in the opposite direction - how far can I push myself to see multiple facets of a story? That is a wild ride, and it gets progressively more wild.

[bigyabai]

> how far can I push myself to see multiple facets of a story?

Please, I'm dying to hear the optimist's take on Mark Zuckerberg's career. It wouldn't happen to be embarassingly foolish, would it?

[senordevnyc]

It sounds like you’re definitely willing to approach it with curiosity.

[bigyabai]

Certainly, if someone is willing to defend him with veracity.

[alexashka]

> I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain

History.

Also, nobody said 'everyone' or 'villain'. How Paul Graham of you.

[bigyabai]

It's the Tragedy of the Commons. There will always be a vacuum of predatory bullshit that can be filled, and the victor is always the biggest sociopath. Rockefeller, Cecil Rhodes, Elon Musk, it's the same traceable pattern all the way back through history. It's not that everyone is like this, but that a few crafty marketeers are able to ruin it for everyone.

Why should I treat Sam and Dario with special white gloves? Are they different, this time? They have peers in China that do the same research and actually release it to the public. They let you run the production weights on your own machine. Am I a cynic, for comparing these CEOs to their populist superiors? Am I stupid for assuming their hostility when they refuse to give us the benefit of the doubt?

I'll believe their actual altruism when I see it. Both are seeped in "boy genius" puffery and lie out their ass. If this is the future of intelligent innovation, then America is truly declining.

[solenoid0937]

The only reason Chinese labs release their research is because they are behind. They lose nothing by doing so because the alpha has already been discovered.

This is not hard to understand. Do you really think DeepSeek would publish their algorithms if they led the American companies? Lmao.

[alightsoul]

do you use american models at work because you choose to or because it's what your employer gives you? is it due to compliance with the american government? two different reasons. most people just use whatever they are given at work.

[bigyabai]

Except this is clearly not true. Opus-tier models like GLM 5.2 have their weights freely available.

Even when they're reaching parity with American models, Z.ai, Qwen and Deepseek are upholding their end of the bargain. I'd criticize them too, if they were due any scrutiny.

[solenoid0937]

I use GLM 5.2 daily. Calling it Opus tier is a bit of a misnomer. It is maybe comparable to Sonnet 5, definitely not Opus 4.8.

It is a great model for the price, but it has much worse autonomy and long context performance, and I don't trust it for anything beyond personal projects, whereas I use Opus/Fable and GPT for work.

[grey-area]

For these particular characters, the evidence is heavily against your panglossian take.

All have collaborated with the current US regime. All have shown signs of being quite willing to compromise their principles in order to make money.

[solenoid0937]

IDK, only one company has held their two red lines in open conflict with the government, while all the others capitulated to "all lawful use."

[naishoya]

simple math. Money == Power.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Given enough money and increasingly perverse incentives to gain even more has a very high potential to corrupt.

Did they start out as corrupt, or was it the influence of the power that came with the obscene amount of money?

It's really a chicken and egg level of calculus.

Doesn't matter which came first, either way you get feathers and chickenshit all over the yard.

Do some very rich people still seem very nice in person? Sure. Of course they must, because otherwise no one would willingly work for or with them. As the total amount of money goes up, the incentives to remain 'seemingly nice' go down and either you get to see who they really are, or who they became through the choices to make that much more money. Doesn't matter which is true.

The examples of non-villainous billionare are rare.

Of non-villainous multi-billionaire; lets see there's about eight of them that stand out for giving significant amount of the massive wealth to helping the world around them, who live normal lives like the people in the communities where they reside, and who participate at the companies they own by eating in the company cafeteria among the people who earn the wealth they enjoy.

Thats 8/3400 global billionaires ... about a quarter of a percent.

And of the 'pledges' like Giving Pledge by the billionaire class, the actual amount delivered - not parked in a family or private trusts for tax deductions; but actually delivered to the front lines of any global crisis amounts to 0.18%, less than one fifth of one percent of the $20.1 TRILLION dollars held by that class of owners. thats less than $2.00 on every $1000.

That's not to say that donating to public needs is 1:1 for non-heinous behavior, but it seems like a basic tool for distinction. the 'can make a significant difference in global suffering : chooses not to' ratio as a surrogate for villain may be useful metric and doesn't require cynicism as the underlying rationale for calling someone's behavior as unkind in general or mean in particular.

[cyanydeez]

Keep in mind, these tech leaders have deluded themselves with the infinite jest of "effective altrusim" which can effective ignore any problem today for some imagined future problem that they're solving. So if they have to enslave the human race because there's a super killer asteroid 10 million lightyears away heading towards us, they'll do it, because obviously, saving future humanity is the only thing that makes sense (because only their genius can save the day)!

[estearum]

Side note for other readers: Parent is describing a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism, which is a distinct (but sometimes overlapping) worldview from effective altruism.

The primary effective altruism cause areas are extremely acute and high-scale problems like malaria, vaccine distribution, and factory farming