boc

The fun part about this is that we can see who is right in about a year. If the leading labs continue making progress at hardening their models against distillation, and then they start pulling away again, we see who is right. If China is able to pass the US and release an independently better model than anything the US has, then your theory is correct.

Both sides have extremely smart people. One side has more $$$ and exclusive access to the best chips. For progress to converge without a corresponding breakthrough suggests there's something else at work.

You're making the point even stronger for US companies to just block EU traffic entirely. If you have no EU customers, the mere act of letting EU visitors on your site might cause an EU country to "make an example" of you for incorrect data handling, but the alternative of just blocking all traffic would let you travel to the EU without issues.

US companies models constantly distill each other as Musk was forced to admit under oath

This whole narrative has just been a massive cope.

So wait, US AI companies all use distillation because... it's not effective and it's all just cope? Or is distillation really powerful and they all do it, which Musk was forced to admit under oath? But when China does distillation it isn't powerful and they don't need to do it, but they do it anyway because it's fun?

Either it's powerful and everyone, including the Chinese labs, use it as a way to rapidly catch-up against the SOTA models, or it's a red herring and the huge amounts of energy spent to protect and enable distillation is all just wasted money. Which is it?

Or option three is they are drafting hard off the frontier US models via distillation.

American recycling in a lot of major cities is single-stream - aka you put all recycling together and a central plant sorts it for you. More efficient, more accurate, and it encourages more people to recycle since it's extremely easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stream_recycling

Missed this whole discussion today because I was here in California, doing a ton of productive work, using Fable.

I think you guys are working yourself into a lather about this topic while other people are quietly getting a ton of shit done with Anthropic's models.

So you're arguing it's the Yogi Berra "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" of business models?

That's not how economies work. It's not a fixed pie that everyone shares.

Anthropic has little to no chance of producing a competitive business model in the long term.

Extraordinary thing to say about the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism. They will soon have access to public markets, essentially unlimited capital, and can build insanely large models that they don't have to make public... ever. They can just use those models to run their business, train better models, eat competitors, etc.

But maybe it's Anthropic that isn't thinking ahead enough - you clearly think you can see around corners with your proclamation. So why do you think they have "little to no chance" of surviving long term?

That's true for domestic labor and manufacturing, like shipbuilding, but the bleeding edge chips only come from one place and the US labs get the best while Chinese labs do not (unless they smuggle them). China gets creative, sure, but it can't overcome the fundamental issue that the US labs have more magic rocks that do math faster than their magic rocks. And the current state of the art is to just "do more math".

You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model.

Yes 1000%, please, all my European competition please don't use mythos whatever you do it's total USA trash and the Chinese models work better anyway.

The ~72 hours I had access to Fable were by far the most productive I've had in months. Re-wrote massive parts of my codebase and caught a ton of bugs and logic issues that had silently slipped through before. I went over my subscription limit and immediately kept paying the API price to keep going. It was that good.

Have you tried Opus on fast mode?

Appreciate my 2UZ-FE more every year.

The IRA and the CHIPS Act were the "last major thing" the Dems did, and both were far better policy for tech than anything out of this current administration.

Anthropic's fear-mongering

I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".

And they had 101 people die of heat-related issues last month. [1] 3,832 Spaniards died in 2025 alone from heat. In 2022, 4,789 died, the all-time high.

The entire United States had 2,325 heat-related deaths in 2023, which is the all-time high.

Do the math (US pop 340M vs Spain 49M) and it gets really ugly.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/spain-records-h...

Are you going to also scold Americans for using heat in the winter?

Our continent has more extreme weather than Europe... we've adapted accordingly because we value human lives. Have you?

OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

Yeah same here, Fable on "high" is producing substantially better results than Open 4.8 on xhigh for me and my actual real-world evals today. It "feels" smarter and doesn't use nearly as many tokens running in circles. As a result I've been able to run two large refactors today without hitting the context limit danger zones - it's more expensive but also more efficient. It's been able to find some bugs that Opus missed. Pretty impressive stuff.

Yeah idk what people are talking about- it's not marketing. This thing is substantially better than opus 4.8/gpt5.5 from what I'm seeing today.

American society has higher wages than almost any other developed nation [1], so it's objectively incorrect to say the US doesn't have good wages. It chooses to make you pay for private childcare and healthcare, both of which are high-quality but stupid expensive. It's a tradeoff like anything else a nation/society creates and prioritizes.

No idea how that connects to the idea that Mistral or DeepSeek are somehow the "good guys" though?

[1]https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...

Just dropping-in to say that I love this idea. Sadly not a full-stack engineer but will follow your progress!

The amount of actual, hard cash revenue these companies are making is a different ballgame from the dot-com bubble.

I see this take, but it's actually helpful to talk to an LLM in human terms; after all, it's how they are trained.

If you keep talking to it like it's a rock, it'll run your queries through a different posture and you might get worse outcomes. Worse if you yell at it, it's now in a conflict resolution mode instead of pure utility mode.

I think we can be intelligent enough to know we're talking to a pile of fancy rocks with electric currents running through it, AND still understand that the best performance comes from talking to those rocks nicely.

"It's the thought that counts"

It's pretty easy to de-orbit satellites or space-based stations. An SM-3 could smoke the ISS pretty easily, and they cost like 10M and we have thousands around the oceans.

Because it's like 1000x more efficient to move stuff on water vs land, so industrial cities clustered around ports and rivers since it's way easier to move stuff around.

They sell "real" apple juice in the US. It's just called apple cider and you can find it at any supermarket.

"Apple cider is raw, unfiltered, and often unpasteurized apple juice, resulting in a cloudy, dark appearance and rich, tart flavor. Apple juice is filtered to remove pulp, pasteurized for a longer shelf life, and often sweeter. Cider is usually seasonal and refrigerated, whereas juice is shelf-stable"

Europeans consistently visit a gas station and conclude this must be all there is to eat in America.

The GX and LX models specifically! Built off the LC platform.