Completed a personal project this week. It is small and niche and probably only interesting to three or four people in the world, but it represents about six months of intentional AI skill building (agentic coffee wrangling) and I am quite pleased with the results. I trained a lora for a the turbo z image model entirely locally on my Macbook pro. The lora captures style of a single Jewish artist from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when the world’s obsession with German culture was waxing. The style is Jugendstil (lit. Young style) called Art Nouveau in English (franklish?) I publish both the lora and the pipeline used to create it. Links below.

Simple. Iran keeps dangling a deal in front of Trump like bait on a hook. Every time it looks like talks are about to collapse, Iran gives just enough ground to make Trump think, "We're almost there, just one more compromise." The closer he thinks he is to getting a deal, the more invested he becomes in protecting it. Then Iran has Hezbollah or another proxy stir up trouble with Israel. Israel responds, as it always does, and Iran immediately turns around and says, "See? We were about to make a deal, but Israel is about to ruin it." At that point, Trump's frustration is directed at Israel instead of Iran. Because he is emotionally and politically invested in getting the deal done, he starts viewing Israel's response as the obstacle rather than Iran's behavior. The result is that Iran gets Washington spending more energy trying to restrain Israel and save negotiations than confronting Iran itself. The deal becomes the carrot, and Trump ends up chasing it while Iran controls the pace. The goal is not necessarily to get a deal. The goal is to keep America believing a deal is always one step away, long enough to weaken its resolve, create friction with its allies, and reduce its willingness to escalate the conflict.

If you don’t know what you are doing, your enemy doesn’t know what you are doing

Have you used it? It's very behind (for now)

Funniest thing I have heard from John Cleese in years 😂

OpenRouter just introduced Fusion API, a compound model that claims Fable 5-level intelligence at half the price. Sounds impressive, but I’d like to see how it holds up in real-world use. Has anyone tried it yet?

Interesting how Elon Musk has said absolutely nothing about the U.S government intervening and forcing Anthropic to pull access to Mythos and Fable models. You think a guy with his own AI lab would have something to say, especially after selling compute to Anthropic.

Claude is offering refunds because Fable is no longer available. Probably not a great sign for Fable coming back anytime soon.

Anthropic: when describing their own product Also Anthropic: when being told of an actual vulnerability

This one is aging well

Running some training -caffeinate -dims

BOOM WHO BROKE MYTHOS AND SPILLED THE BEANS! Justice Served: Amazon Researchers Hands Anthropic a Brutal Reality Check via Uncle Sam Take a seat as this is getting ridiculously interesting! Oh, the sweet, spicy irony. Anthropic the self-proclaimed AI safety saints who love lecturing everyone about doomerism, existential risks, and how their god-like models need heavy guardrails because think of the children (and China) just got absolutely hoisted by their own petard. And the blade? Courtesy of Amazon. Here’s the timeline: Anthropic drops Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — their shiny new cybersecurity beasts hyped as capable of sniffing out software vulnerabilities like a bloodhound on steroids, but with “safe” wrappers for the public. They pat themselves on the back for responsible release… while quietly expanding access and flexing those offensive cyber chops to governments and partners. Enter Amazon researchers (yes, from the company that’s poured billions into Anthropic and hosts their models on AWS). They cook up some clever prompts, jailbreak Fable 5’s safeguards, and get it to cough up details on real security vulnerabilities. Not a full apocalypse unlock just practical bug-hunting stuff that defenders would actually use. Wall Street Journal reports: They document it and, instead of a polite responsible disclosure to their “partner,” it ends up in the hands of the US government. They did the right thing ethically and legally. And Boom. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick drops an export control hammer faster than you can say “national security.” Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are now restricted for any foreign nationals anywhere. Anthropic, unable to magically geo-fence API keys or fire their own non-US staff on the spot, yanks access for everyone worldwide. Models dead. Users stranded. Dario Amodei’s team spits out a 700 word cope-blog claiming it’s a “narrow, non-universal jailbreak,” no big deal, other models do it too, and the government overreacted. This is poetic justice at its finest. For years, Anthropic has positioned itself as the virtuous alternative — heavy on the fear-mongering, light on actually shipping unrestricted power, all while cozying up to Big Tech investors and government contracts. They warned the world their tech was too dangerous… then released it anyway with theatrical safeguards. Now a competitor-investor (Amazon) demonstrates exactly why you don’t hype your model’s cyber-offense potential like it’s a nuke and expect zero blowback. The Trump admin, already feuding with Anthropic over Pentagon terms and “woke doomerism,” wasn’t in the mood for nuance. Export controls deployed. Models grounded. IPO dreams just got a very public haircut. Lesson? Play the safety piety card (going to the Pope!) too hard in the AI arms race, and eventually the grown-ups (or rival labs with government ears) will take you at your word. Amazon didn’t even need to go full saboteur they just showed the receipts. Anthropic’s own hype and hedging came back to bite them in the most humiliating way possible: sidelined by their investor while the rest of the frontier keeps shipping. Schadenfreude level: maximum. The “responsible” lab that cried wolf just got muzzled by the very system they helped politicize. Pass the popcorn this AI drama is far from over.

Here's your requested retro 1940s home front PSA poster for running local models today!

run local models TODAY

Some thought: 1) The Anthropic fiascos is a self-inflicted wound and likely a payback. 2) I spent the night helping many clients off of Anthropic and moving to local open source models and many very large clients will NEVER go back. This has absolutely advantaged open source model from China. 3) This situation NO MATTER WHAT permanently damaged the Anthropic IPO. 4) At 3AM last night I helped a client team move a massive account off of all Anthropic products. This was worth millions of dollars per month and this was the last straw. 5) The fall of Anthropic should not be applauded by anyone. The fall of the company should be viewed as an injury to All US AI COMPANIES. 6) The Anthropic fiasco is not a technical issue, it is a LEADERSHIP issue. If it is not fixed the company is cooked. 7) By the time we end this summer no matter how good Anthropic is, they lose customers, they lose key employees and they ultimately will lose the race. It was a sad day on top of a massively great day with the SpaceX IPO and one reason I did not post last night. Dario asked to be regulated, begged to be regulated and yelled to be regulated… NOW HE IS REGULATED. You like it now Dario?

It is hard not to have some schadenfreude over this situation, given the policy paper that accompanied launch. But it appears treebeard is not as slow and stupid and @DarioAmodei believed it to be. A couple of things to note: -This did not require a new law, existing ITAR regulations were sufficient to deal with the threat and ITAR definitely applies here, it’s not a stretch -it is clear that the DOC was trying to find ways not to exercise this authority, but the combative posture of Anthropic to the current administration caused them to miscalculate, again -@elonmusk saw this coming and prepared for it by merging xAI with spaceX which is already covered under ITAR regulations (as rocket technology is a dual use technology) This will be a competitive advantage to xAI, though they paid a price in talent -ITAR is a mess of a law, with limited case law, so any challenge will be wildly unpredictable, it exacerbates immigration tensions -The US government has been back door regulating AI and now they are doing it openly There is s lot to unpack here and I wish I could discuss it with Fable 5

Sounds like ork mischief to me…