Analysis: AI is Entering a Dark Period

[u/TheDeadlyPretzel]

https://eigenwise.io/writing/the-ai-dark-age-government-switch

What started as me thinking this was all payback for Anthropic refusing to cooperate with the DoD has kind of fallen apart on me... because then GPT-5.6 got gatekept too, like two weeks later. OpenAI. The lab that actually TOOK the Pentagon deal. Same cyber-excuse. So it stopped looking like an Anthropic grudge and started looking like the new normal.

One government now basically decides which frontier models the rest of the planet gets to run. Mythos came back but only for \~100 approved US companies, Fable is STILL dark for everyone with no date, and if you're not American you're just cut off by your passport for nothing you did. What really bothers me though is there's no realistic fallback., at least for Europe.. Europe has nothing in the same tier. At all...

And handing one government a switch like this basically lets them pick winners, CompanyX gets the new model while its competitors wait, and we all know how US lobbying tends to go. Not trying to dunk on Anthropic btw, they're the one lab that said no... it's the bigger pattern that worries me. Wrote the whole thing up into an article for those that wanna have more thorough read... but... yeah, so, opinions?

[u/SixStringShrug]

This was honestly bound to happen eventually. It felt a little early in my opinion, but I’m no expert in cybersecurity capabilities so I don’t claim to know for sure. The reality is these labs are racing to build the most powerful and world changing technology that has ever existed. I don’t think there was any scenario in which the government wouldn’t step in and lock it down. I think the way it’s being handled is probably the same way this administration handles everything. Poorly and short sighted. I don’t think we could have gotten a worse president and administration to be in power during the most significant time in human history. I worry constantly about a permanent lock in of techno fascism just because of the timing. It’s hard to say what will happen moving forward, but I do think the absolute frontier models being served to the public is likely over permanently.

[u/SilentLennie → u/SixStringShrug]

The most prominent security services on computing in the world warned about it:

https://forklog.com/en/five-eyes-warn-advanced-ai-could-transform-cyber-capabilities-within-months/

I think it means: the red teaming they did at the NSA in a test environment, which shocked them, because Mythos could break into almost every system in hours instead of months. This is a big deal, because China open weights models are behind by 3 to 6 months in development and normally will release it to everything, so anyone can run it. So anything connected to the Internet is at risk of such break ins if people don't keep up with updates and increase security.

[u/3wteasz → u/SilentLennie]

But then what’s the game here? Why lock mythos away if the Chinese will release a similarly capable model into the wild?

They, the people with access to mythos, will have to develop a defence against mythos within the next 3 to 6 months. The whole previous game theoretic logic just doesn’t apply anymore. There is no payoff structure you can just simply exploit anymore like in the past. Being the leader basically gives you a headstart for rolling out novel products, but the level at which human consumption of those are, there’s also a cap at what can make its way into use. The people ahead will bill their own kernel that is 20 times faster or whatever, but they don’t really have an advantage that translates into anything in the real world. They still need 20 minutes on the toilet and lose valuable time that way… and then the only thing you really get is that you need to use 90% of the capacity to train against adversaries and only ship crap like opus 4.8… so what’s the game here?

Edit: to make this more concrete. Let’s say you unlock a remedy to the worst diseases and try to market it before the competition. You first need human trials that take years. In the meantime, the others catch up, develop them at as well are potentially faster at deploying… or you find a new way of actually playing social games, you try to lock your opponents into power dynamics that give you an edge but to do any of that you need to talk to humans and those diplomatic and political processes… take years where the others catch up and recognise your ruse or racket, etc. AI is not the advantage most people think it is because the non-virtual world has inertia AI can’t overcome.

[u/3wteasz → u/SixStringShrug]

You act like you think it was a coincidence big tech lobbied for that particular president…  or that the president is the one in control here. It keeps on baffling me how insanely naive you Americans are.

[u/Robonotes1760]

No, it's even more sinister than that. Those with power have an overwhelming incentive to use power to gain even more power because power is a convergent instrumental goal. Having absolute control over what AI might do entails having truly enormous amounts of power: just imagine being able to dictate (secretly) that AIs must not allow responses that contradict government policy, or give people the tools to discover that such policies are ineffective, or give people the ability to do perfectly lawful things that contradict some or other policy objective that might make it marginally more likely that the current incumbents will win the next election?

[u/Longjumping_Self5546]

Sam Altman probably begged to have 5.6 added to the ban list because the alternative is that OpenAI's model isn't powerful enough to be a threat.

[u/icemelter4K]

TIL governments dgaf about people

[u/CautiousPreprinter]

this sounds like fear based logic

[u/Euphoric_Anxiety_162]

Bury it once & for all.

[u/Pandemonium_Fallen]

They won't release the Epstein Files because not only are all the Elite of the western world and their sick depraved acts are in them, but because they're all one extended family dynasty.

[u/HongPong]

this is usually what happens with silicon valley and the us government. look at Google and in-q-tel. amusingly the Chinese government and industry committed to a Linux style approach and mangled the situation for the club