The question is, will anyone pay enough for Mythos to offset the opportunity cost of offering that much Opus? You don't want to end up in a spot where you don't have enough compute and your service's reliability degrades to an unusable state like xAI.

No insider info, but just wanted to mention that pricing signals things too. If Mythos is only servable at $X*Y dollars and isn’t Y times better than $X of compute at another provider, it’s quite possible that affects the IPO price negatively versus the halo of having the worlds most expensive model that is “too powerful to release” unpriced and unbenchmarked.

I think that most people at Anthropic are true believers from my interactions with them so I don’t believe this theory anecdotally. The simplest explanation is that it really is taking a while to gain confidence they won’t be used for a spree of bad cyber attacks. Knowing how long it takes institutions to fix security issues when filed by humans I would be more suprised if this wasn’t the case.

But I would forgive anyone who did think it was deliberately sandbagged; given the staggering sums at play, true believers might believe the ends justify the means to a little “marketing” like this.

Sort of, but valuation models depend on X being in a certain range. If it > this range, revenue and therefore valuation are impacted.

And then the bubble would collapse. Corps are already putting limits on token usage across the board because of costs. Increasing costs would significantly contract the hype bubble.

All of us, including you, know that he is not saying "they are being transparent." When someone says "it's clear that..." in this way they're saying "It's clear to us what is really happening here.

Yes, 300 MW from SpaceX helps a lot, but I think that’s mainly to support Opus demand, which has grown faster than expected. If Mythos is roughly 5× more expensive to serve than Opus, as the pricing suggests, then 300 MW is nowhere near enough to enable large-scale deployment of Mythos.

As an ordinary developer who relies on a $20–$200/month subscription, I feel disappointed by the release of a paper describing a model that I can’t actually use.

But that compute might not be available to then long term. Hard to make big moves with a contract like that.

OpenAI has been pulling this marketing trick for years. Remember how GPT-3 was too dangerous to release? It's also probably bad PR if script kiddies have access to GPT model with no guardrails even if it doesn't enable any significant attacks.