alt Hacker News"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..
Replies
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.
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
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?
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)
> 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.
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.
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.)
> 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?
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)!
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.