a) Anthropic is lying, and every company that is collaborating on vulnerability squishing project is an accomplice in this big lie
b) Anthropic has then goldest gold of the shovels to sell to people, which is actually useful for enterprises
Everyone, including Ant, understands that other companies will catch up in terms of model strength. So it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position wrt releasing it to the public.
The model is probably legitimately better. But it might not be enough better to justify the extra cost of inference.
They know if they released it publicly, people will be able to see exactly how smart it is, and adjust their demand correspondingly. Anthropic will either need to price it high enough that nobody uses it (and the hardware is sitting mostly idle to servicing a few customers), or lower their profit margins (potentially below cost) to price it fairly.
So instead, they bundle it with this fancy new exploit finding scaffold, and sell the combined it to enterprise customers. I bet the scaffold works fine with smaller models, but gets notably improved results with Mythos.
The two products support each-other, and with the exclusive bundle Anthropic can get more profit selling both together than they would get selling them individually.
And as an added bonus, people over estimate the capability of this unreleased model, providing hype for Anthropic.
a) Anthropic is lying, and every company that is collaborating on vulnerability squishing project is an accomplice in this big lie b) Anthropic has then goldest gold of the shovels to sell to people, which is actually useful for enterprises
Everyone, including Ant, understands that other companies will catch up in terms of model strength. So it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position wrt releasing it to the public.