alt Hacker NewsThe Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy
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> SK Telecom has poured capital into Anthropic several times, including a $100 million investment in 2023 that coincided with the formation of a commercial partnership to develop an AI model tailored to the telecommunications industry.
> the White House asked Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom’s access to Mythos, according to a person close to the AI lab. The company immediately complied,
Lesson learned - don't invest in US companies
The Wired headline reframes the issue in a way that’s misleading. SK Telecom was a previously resolved issue (as in prior to Fable launch).
It may have been a contributing factor, but the crux of the shutdown was the industry reporting of Fable jailbreaks (reportedly spearheaded by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy). The more interesting and honest angle is that the industry which has taken the seriousness of Glasswing at face value felt blindsided by Fable release and totally exposed by the residual risk, when they know they still have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing and are desperate to buy more time.
This misleading looks deliberate on Wired’s part, to appear as though they’re getting a scoop when they’re really just being dishonest. Shameful.
Looking at the comments on Korean political articles, the point is not so much whether SKT is actually related to China, but rather that the switch to cut off AI vendors is now outside the realm of model performance specs. Now, when foreign companies integrate AI into their workflows, they probably need to add a category for vendor continuity in their evaluation criteria. From a corporate standpoint, uninterrupted continuity is what matters, and with this case, Anthropic is likely to lose a lot of trust, contrary to its own stated policies.
Just a gentle reminder that the SK in Hynix and the SK in Telecom all belong to the same actual family (the Cheys)
Anthropic may discover a lack of availability for HBM memory in the near future.
This whole Fable 5 controversy will look quite silly once China releases a comparable model in six months.
its very real, chinese capital is being intertwined/injected into all facet of south korean society through its own domestic companies and politicians.
Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. It's outstanding how much praise and careful consideration it gets. At the same time, humans with even more expertise are discarded and fired.
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Over a decade ago, I was going to a tech group with a supposed security leader (that ended up getting a huge buyout from Cisco a few years ago).
A student wanted to create a project that bypassed the GF of China. He basically told him he was an idiot, it was impossible, and discouraged the student from even trying. This was a hacker (the security leader) at one point in his life, that claimed to support the freedom of speech and expression.
The actual reason he said this to the student is because he supports the government in China. Many other comments I heard after this proved to me that this is true. My guess is that his startup even received funding from the Chinese government.
It's really disappointing that tech leaders can publicly support murderous regimes like the Chinese government for decades with no blow back. They are far worse than Putin/the Russian government and have 100X the money and technology.
If he supported Russia, he would probably get cancelled and never be able to be involved in the tech industry again.
The articles and discussion around this and the Amazon story all seem to me to be an earnest tech press and community searching for a genuine reason for the administration blocking Anthropic’s models.
However, thinking back to the spat with the DoD and more generally how the administration is much more supportive - and supported by - OpenAI and XAI and it’s easy to imagine this is just another escalation in the fight between a “liberal leaning” company and its competitors and the administration.
There might have been something said by someone at Amazon or something but I’d guess Occam’s razor the administration just leapt at the chance after their supplier sanctions fell flat?