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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

> Antitrust law generally prohibits competing companies from agreeing to restrict innovation.

The antitrust claims are a complete smokescreen. Industries can and do adopt safety standards without government intervention.

> These companies are in a Nash equilibrium where they can't unilaterally slow down without essentially destroying their company.

So what? Anthropic believes their work has a 10% chance of killing all humans. I think risking the destruction of Anthropic's business should be worth avoiding that, if that's what they believe. And with one half of the frontier duopoly gone, the other half would have no incentive to race forward. And I know there's China, but they just get all their capabilities from distilling Claude, right? So, problem solved there, too.

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> adopt safety standards

Sure, but does slowing down the development of new models count as "adopting safety standards"? I very much doubt it.

> Anthropic believes their work has a 10% chance of killing all humans

This ignores the other part of what they believe, which is that they are the people most likely to make a model that doesn't do that. So, in their view, letting other companies win would increase the probability of human extinction.

> with one half of the frontier duopoly gone, the other half would have no incentive to race forward

I don't see how this could possibly be true, with at least half a dozen companies being just months behind what the frontier labs are releasing.

> Sure, but does slowing down the development of new models count as "adopting safety standards"? I very much doubt it.

I mean, the point (if the claim is to be believed) isn't just to "slow down the development", it's to take more time during development to properly assess the risks the models pose, develop methodologies to reduce that risk, and standardize that across companies. I doubt those wouldn't count, especially in the eyes of regulators of an administration calling for that same slow down.

> Sure, but does slowing down the development of new models count as "adopting safety standards"?

Of course! What slows down the development is the adoption of specific safety conditions the companies draw up. They can just do that, and it will hold up in court.

> in their view, letting other companies win would increase the probability of human extinction

Yes, I've heard: "We must be in charge even if we end up killing everyone in the process." I personally think that proposition is invalid, but we're all entitled to our opinions.

> it will hold up in court.

People used to append IANAL to such statements :-)

> I personally think that proposition is invalid

I agree, but that's meaningless in this context. I was responding to the claim that "if they wanted to pace the frontier, would simply do it", which is false, given what they actually believe.

We all have beliefs. Some more self-important than others.

Do you think their beliefs deserve some sort of special treatment?

> Do you think their beliefs deserve some sort of special treatment?

No.

> And I know there's China, but they just get all their capabilities from distilling Claude, right?

I hope this is a joke. But most of the LLM research and inventions come from China? The best papers are from DeepSeek? You either get the data by stealing from humans or distilling from bigger models?

Yes, I was being facetious. Chinese labs are doing the most interesting research and publishing it. But Anthropic beats the "distillation attack" drum every time doubts surface about the depth of their technical moat. Of course, when they need a scary bogeyman, then the story shifts to how China is recklessly racing ahead building dangerously powerful models. That's the thing with Anthropic: they speak out of all 13 sides of their mouths.

> China is recklessly racing ahead building dangerously powerful models

Their fear-mongering about GLM 5.3 got me to try it out. Its very good, I'll only go back to Claude if GLM isn't available (it forgot how to do tool calls yesterday).

Interestingly enough, it seems to compact at about 10% of the 1mn context, which makes sense if they're trying to run profitably.

I like to do some discussions and back and forth with GLM. It doesn't hallucinate as much or gaslight like DeepSeek does. DeepSeek is great if you have a plan and you let it go. Also can plan a bit. But it has this sparse attention and especially the index_topk is too small in common deployments so it doesn't "see" all the context. And it then imagines things which is annoying if you chat with it about stuff you develop in the session.

I recommend trying Coralbricks with GLM due to their cheap input cache prices. GLM can get quite expensive elsewhere.

There's a duopoly? news to me.

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