> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.
Given the list of very large companies in the "glasswing" project - it is likely every competent state actor and criminal organization already has access to Mythos in one way or another. Meanwhile the opensource volunteers responsible for the security of the entire internet don't have access.
It's not an easy problem to solve. You can identify certain open source projects that you deem critical and give them access too in a private fashion (maybe even under NDA). Not every state actor will have early access; Russia and the Chinese surely won't, and that matters in current affairs. It's probably only the US gvmt, not even European allies, who currently can use Mythos. The announcement specifically says "Anthropic has also been in ongoing discussions with US government officials about Claude Mythos Preview".
There is no good solution to this. Only less bad. It annoys me a bit that many comments on HN imply that open-sourcing everything right away is the answer to everything. To be clear, I'm not annoyed at your comment specifically, it's more an overall sentiment that I perceive here that I feel is very complacent. We've already seen how OSS maintainers get overwhelmed by AI vulnerability reports; I feel it's a responsible thing to gatekeep this for as long as possible (which really is only a few months, at most - other models catch up fast), and try to work with important maintainers directly to help fix the most critical stuff and onboard them to a new world of the AI-assisted cat-and-mouse security game.
This is just damage control. The damage, i.e. the attack capabilities opened up by this, is pretty brutal, and likely requires a substantial shift in mindset from OSS maintainers. This approach gives a few months of transition time. Who decides who is an important maintainer and who isn't? Again, super grey area; there's no time to decide on a proper process given how fast other models will catch up, so realistically you can just do a bit of a best effort here and try to not botch it up entirely. Anthropic went with the Linux foundation here. It's a reasonable choice. Not a perfect one, but you gotta start somewhere.
> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.
This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired for following the herd.
> No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson)
Elon Musk is planning to put his AI company into the SpaceX IPO, and accelerate getting it into the major indices, effectively making pension funds, banks and individual investors his bag holders.
Patric Boyle has a video on this in case you care for the details.
I guess it's possible for the top companies to have spent so much already, that now the best move is to convince the next tier to do the same otherwise those competitiors may pull ahead without such a financial handicap.
If you're a billionaire there's no risk to "sticking to principles", so there's nothing to admire. Also that's not what they're doing. These are calculated moves in a negotiation and the trump regime only has 3 years left. Even a CEO can think 4 years ahead.
It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.
i disagree. 3 years is an insanely long time in the AI space. The entire industry pretty much didn't even exist three years ago! Or at least not within 4 orders of magnitude.
Also, every other company has bent the knee and kissed the ring. And the trump admin will absolutely do everything they can to not appear weak and harm Anthropic. If it was so easy to act principled, don't you think other companies would've refused too? Eg Apple
And there is real harm here. You're reading about it - they get labeled a supply chain risk. This is negative and very tangible
I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.
Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing.
But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.
So when some people talk about tech debt we don’t talk about perfect code or file structure, it’s about painting a wall in a tropical rain, building a house during an earthquake etc. So count yourself happy I guess.
> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time
Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.
Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.
It wasn't that long ago that email servers just trusted all input, and we saw what happened there. Right now the entire internet is wide open to LLM bots and the same thing will happen. But rather than just happening to one thing (email) it will happen to everything everywhere all at once.
That comes post Chernobyl.
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