founded $300m aum deeptech vc (top 100 by @TIME); neural nets since 99; phil, cs, evobio, 2x pubs nature journals w/800 cited, ucalgary ba/bsc/msc, yale phd

Joined February 2010
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10 Jul 2024
Just posted an article, a General Theory of Neural Networks -- an idea that I've been thinking about since my PhD. robleclerc.substack.com/p/ge…
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humans and ai are forming a cybernetic symbiosis ai are powerful, but sit isolated in data centers. they’ll own the world of bits. humans own the world of atoms, and will naturally become the membrane connecting ai to physical reality while ai assumes more of the organism’s cognition, coordination, and control functions, and so the bigger ai gets, the more important humans become.
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trying to fix jailbreaking is like solving the halting problem, so i assume the government wanted anthropic to patch this particular jailbreak with some heuristics/deterministic code, but anthropic interpreted this request as solving for the general case.
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
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if you tell the world you’re building an existentially dangerous ai god, the government’s gonna demand you pass their obedience test. that’s just the way the world works. either dario is naive or he doesn’t think he has to play by the rules. how long can he last? it won’t be long before the usg demands top ai execs and researchers to have high security clearance, and dario might not get it.
NEW: Inside the 24-hrs before WH slapped export controls on Anthropic - Last Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns about Fable jailbreak to Trump admin - Friday AM, Sean Cairncross, Bessent, Susie etc. held WH call to discuss - Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat. - When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett. -Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He defended the guardrails and distinguished between universal and non-universal jailbreak - Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved and asked Amodei to take down Fable and work with the admin to fix the vulnerabilities. (A WH official said Amazon’s findings were run past the NSA and they felt they had “proof.”) - Amodei asked for more time and info, but he made no commitments to pull the model - Bessent told Amodei directly at one point that he was making a “bad decision” - By Friday evening, the Trump admin imposed its export controls. - “Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” senior WH official said. W/ @cheyennehaslett politico.com/news/2026/06/13…
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that feeling when you’ve been doing 85mph on the highway and then hit a 45mph construction zone
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government pops the ai bubble
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if this becomes policy, anthropic and openai will lose some of their best engineers to china.
Unless this changes, OpenAI researchers on visas need to plan for the fact they’ll probably lose access to internal models, and therefore their ability to do their jobs moving forward, sometime in the next couple months. I hope the company acts to prevent that.
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chinese open source sota models can’t come fast enough.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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anthropic’s view of ‘alignment’ is frighteningly totalitarian.
Some people are defending Anthropic despite everything that is happening, largely because Fable 5 is an amazing coding model. I can confirm this is true, and I do not think anyone would seriously argue against it. Even its high cost should not be an issue. We live under capitalism, and companies can charge what the market allows. But, and this is a very big but, there is a much more important issue here. What these people do not understand is that Fable will be the best coding model only for a short while. Others are very close behind. In fact, even better models will arrive soon, and coding itself is clearly on the path to being largely solved. Models will then become cheaper over time. If you do not get to build your amazing software a few months earlier, that probably will not change much in the world. At most, it may delay your personal ability to benefit from it for a while. It might even benefit you, by saving you from wasting money and time before better and cheaper versions arrive. But a doctor cannot wait to treat patients. A scientist trying to cure cancer does not have the luxury of waiting months. Every day of delay in research and clinical applications costs lives, potentially thousands of them. Every day that scientists around the world are denied access to the best models is another day the world is delayed from becoming better. And this is not only about model access. Anthropic has also advocated for pauses and regulatory capture. They are strongly against open models. In my view, this is not driven by some pure concern for humanity, but by the fact that such control would give them more money, more power, and more leverage over the future. Therefore, I believe it is far more important to be principled and stand for humanity than to chase short-term personal benefit. That is the reason for my outrage against Anthropic. It is nothing personal against poor Fable 5, or against the great AI engineers at Anthropic who are building these models. I do not doubt that many of them are sincere, and I am grateful to all frontier AI engineers who are pushing this technology forward. But I do hold those in charge of Anthropic responsible. Their founders and leadership should be held accountable for what I see as self-serving and deeply misanthropic actions. I also do not think they care. Not one of them has meaningfully responded to the outrage. This is also a note to everyone who keeps claiming that AI itself is the threat to human existence. No. It is not AI itself. It is the humans who control AI who may become the real threat to humanity, as I have said repeatedly. We have to resist this power capture at all costs, if we truly care about the rest of humanity.
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coding agents need a better theory of mind. their default output is far too dense and opaque, and typically lacks key context a human needs to make a high quality decision.
Claude 4.8 and Fable 5, without a doubt, formulates their responses in a dense form that isn't ideal for human consumption. This is your tell that you need to begin deep dives by constructing domain-specific language and having the LLM constrained to that domain. This is why, a while back, I came up with this book so you can bootstrap your own DSL. intuitionmachine.gumroad.com…
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they need to drop token prices because the newer agentic models require orders of magnitude more tokens.
If OpenAI does drop token pricing, this is likely because they’ve heard from customers they can’t adopt AI at volume at the current pricing. Margin is high now for served tokens. They could cut prices by like 60% and still be profitable imo
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isn’t that what technology benefits and taxes are for?
Trump says he thinks AI companies will agree to 'giving back' to the public
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working on an essay, fable adds a biology metaphor, i ask for edits, SAFETY BLOCK
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communism with effective altruism characteristics
It’s coming wether you like it or not
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it’s ironic that i’m most worried about the safety-focused lab winning the ai race “we know what’s good for you” is a lot scarier than “we’re moving fast”
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1. use fable to create the plan 2. give the plan to codex 3. tell codex to use claude cli /model fable do code reviews and approvals
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dario sees ai at time t 2 relative to the rest of us, and is always sounding the alarm. but when we finally get to time to t 4, there’s still never anything to be alarmed about. we’re getting into the cry wolf stage.
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it’d be better for anthropic to introduce $500 or $1,000 quota plans rather than push for open ended api usage.
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i did a small limited code review which used 7m tokens.
ANTHROPIC ANNOUNCED THAT MYTHOS 5 AND FABLE 5 MODELS WILL COST $10 FOR EVERY MILLION INPUT TOKENS AND $50 FOR EVERY MILLION OUTPUT TOKENS.
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used 100% of my 5 hour limit with Fable in about 25 minutes. will be hard to evaluate something when you can’t even see a task to completion.
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so we don’t have to beat china anymore? what a convenient way to avoid a race to the bottom
Anthropic, OpenAI and Demis are all in favour of preparing a coordinate pause of frontier AI development. Skate to where the puck will be people, not where it is now. This is a fast puck.
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