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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

Well China is consistently 6 months behind the frontier labs(possibly because they can they harvest data from released frontier models). If the scaling continues, US will win, but if not then China will win as the models will converge.

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The non-release of Mythos tell you the future of that, so long as they can keep the weights from being exfiltrated. Once models become true national security threats, they won't be released in their full form. The hitch-a-ride approach becomes less capable of keeping up.

How would they prevent distillation? That would seem pretty tough to block for any LLM available for commercial use.

By only providing degraded models to use commercially outside national defense applications would be my guess. As soon as models are a threat in terms of enabling biowarfare etc, then they just are not going to be generally released.

Honestly, I think its quite possible that models will be retrained with gaps in their knowledge. e.g. a coding model for commercial use probably doesn't need to have deep knowledge of biology, and training on biological sciences probably doesn't help those evals much.

Honestly, I'd welcome such an approach.

What a hilariously uninformed comment. LLMs are not the limiting factor in biowarfare.

LLMs absolutely have the potential to increase the risk of small nation biowarfare and bioterrorism more generally. That you don't believe so is dangerously naive.

This post claims that Opus 4.7 has introduced some detrimental changes to stymie distillation:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1snorbg/the_bigg...

I don't know enough about distillation to understand how much this hinders/slows the process, but it sounds at least superficially plausible.

We were talking about winning commercially, not on model quality.

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