About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of Anthropic's powerful AI model Mythos and the evolving landscape of AI safety and market demand.

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced an AI model so capable and so dangerous that it decided not to release it to the public. The model, codenamed Mythos, could autonomously infiltrate computer systems around the world, exploit security vulnerabilities, conceal its own reasoning, and fabricate false explanations for what it was doing. Anthropic instead shared it with a small consortium of companies to help them find their own cybersecurity flaws. You could be forgiven for some skepticism. Is this a genuine safety call, or Anthropic’s way of marketing its own power? But independent benchmarks suggest Mythos is real: On the Epoch Capabilities Index, which aggregates 40 separate AI evaluations, it represents the biggest single leap in model performance in three years. That story is one of two major phase shifts happening simultaneously in AI right now. The first: from racing to release, to treating your own product as too dangerous to publish. The second: from a story about demand scarcity—is anyone actually paying for this stuff?—to supply scarcity, where companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on AI agents and the hyperscalers still can’t keep up. Today’s…

People in this episode

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Kevin Roose

Topics covered

• AI safety
• cybersecurity
• AI model performance
• AGI
• market dynamics in AI

Keywords

• AI model
• Mythos
• Anthropic
• cybersecurity
• AGI
• ChatGPT
• Epoch Capabilities Index

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Anthropic, New York Times, ChatGPT, Epoch Capabilities Index

Products: Mythos

Places: China

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