Three reasons to think that yesterday’s Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown:
Where Tom Fridman worried in his Times column yesterday about kids accidentally blowing up the power grid…
… the actual system tested was given a much easier job than in real life, with “sandboxing” turned off, making it more of proof of concept than an immediate threat.
Open-weight models can already do a fair amount of what Mythos can do, in a simplified preparation. Mythos is more sophisticated but perhaps not head-and-shoulders the way it was portrayed.
The model itself is incrementally better than previous recent models, but certainly not an off-the-chart breakthrough:
To a certain degree, I feel that we were played. The demo was definitely proof of concept that we need to get our regulatory and technical house in order, but not the immediate threat the media and public was lead to believe.