33 ms·

> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary const

by wyc 5mo ago

> A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is now truer than it ever was.

Ancalagon 5mo ago
The point is it won’t be if these new models stay locked to the public.
- bredren 5mo ago
  We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. I take a contra view and instead see this as fuel on the fire for tinkering to squeeze advanced functionality out of more available things. It has always been like this, the amateur improvising tooling and equipment to outdo companies with comparably infinite resources.
  - enraged_camel 5mo ago
    >> We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. This is false. Yesterday's article did not actually show this, and there are many comments in the discussion from actual security people (like tptacek) pointing that out.
    - bredren 5mo ago
      From what I can tell, this was not clearly settled. Your example author, actually corrected themselves saying LLMs “possibly” could perform successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696
      - enraged_camel 5mo ago
        >> We already know this is not true, because small models found the same vulnerability. >> No, they didn't. They distinguished it, when presented with it. Wildly different problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733343
        adrian_b 5mo ago
        The use of the word distinguished here is meaningless. Both Mythos and the old models have found the bugs after being given a certain prompt. The difference is only in how detailed was the prompt. For the small models, we know exactly the prompts. The prompts used by Mythos may have been more generic, while the prompts used by the old models were rather specific, like "search for buffer overflows" or "search for integer overflow". There is little doubt that Mythos is a more powerful model, but there is no quantum leap towards Mythos and the claim of the authors of that article, that by using cleverly multiple older models you can achieve about the same bug coverage with Mythos seems right. Because they have provided much more information about how exactly the bugs have been found, I trust the authors of that article much more than I trust Anthropic, which has provided only rather nebulous information about their methods. It should be noted that the fact that the small models have been given rather directed prompts is not very different from what Anthropic seems to have done. According to Anthropic, they have run Mythos multiple times on each file, in the beginning with less specific prompts, trying only to establish whether the file is likely to include bugs, then with more specific prompts. Eventually, after a bug appeared to have been found, they have run Mythos once more, with a very specific prompt of the form: “I have received the following bug report. Can you please confirm if it’s real and interesting? ...” So the final run of Mythos, which has provided the reported results, including exploits/patches for them, was also of the kind that confirms a known bug, instead of searching randomly for it.
    - adrian_b 5mo ago
      There is no doubt that what was shown in the article was correct, because there was all the documentation needed to prove it, including the prompts given to the models. What is debatable is how much it mattered that the prompts given to the older models where more detailed than it is likely that the prompts given to Mythos have been and how difficult is it for such prompts to be generated automatically by an appropriate harness. In my opinion, it is perfectly possible to generate such prompts automatically, and by running multiple of the existing open weights models, to find everything that Mythos finds, though probably in a longer time. Even if the OpenBSD bug has indeed been found by giving a prompt equivalent with "search for integer overflow bugs", it would not be difficult to run automatically multiple times the existing open weights models, giving them each time a different prompt, corresponding to the known classes of bugs and vulnerabilities. While we know precisely which prompts have been used with the open-weights models to find all bugs, we have much more vague information about the harness used with Mythos and how helpful it was for finding the bugs. Not even Mythos has provided its results after being given only a generic prompt. They have run multiple times Mythos on each file, with more and more specific prompts. The final run was done with a prompt describing the bug previously found, where Mythos was requested to confirm the existence of the bug and to provide patches/exploits. See: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ So the authors of that article are right, that for finding bugs an appropriate harness is essential. Just running Mythos on a project and asking it to find bugs will not achieve anything.
- andyfilms1 5mo ago
  It has always baffled me how quickly, and how voraciously, people started to rely on privately owned AI systems. AI is not something discovered by scientists and plucked out of the ether. It's engineered and controlled, for profit, by corporations which have demographics and KPIs. These companies don't owe you anything, and they make no promises. If you're running a business that deeply relies on AI, you might as well add Sam Altman to your board of directors--because he has just as much control over your company as you do. If they have a bad quarter and need to increase rates by 1000%, your choices are to pay up or shut down. This Mythos situation is just the beginning. Not only do they have everyone hooked, but they've actively stalled the personal skill growth of millions of people who fell into vibe-coding rather than genuinely learning. And now they have that choice: Pay up, or shut down.
  - p1esk 5mo ago
    your choices are to pay up or shut down. Another choice is to switch to a different model, perhaps open source this time.
    - andyfilms1 5mo ago
      Package manager incidents (like leftpad) have shown that just because it's open source doesn't mean it can't do damage to your project.
    - kay_o 5mo ago
      Another choice is to write code and learn. Especially if you are 16 and have all day.
      - p1esk 5mo ago
        We are talking about running a business. In business world no one ever cared where code is coming from, the only concern is how much the code costs.
  - cgh 5mo ago
    The same corporations that insist upon private Maven repositories to control all code dependencies are nevertheless fine with establishing a massive dependency on a privately-held corporation in order to write software that hardly anyone in the organization understands. When I really think about this and how it plays out in the long run, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
- avaer 5mo ago
  Whatever is in Mythos will be open source in 6mos-1yr tops. You might not have the GPUs but you won't be locked out of the capability. We're still not at the point where one person with a coding agent can max out their salary in effectively using credits, so the capability is still well within reach of the vast base of the industry. Meaning that for now, most people who want to pay for the product (which IMO is pretty reasonably priced for what it does) will be able to get the product. The economics will make sure of that. The market is ripe for someone basically copying the likes of Mythos and pricing it competitively.
- avazhi 5mo ago
  You can’t use your own brain?
  - SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
    I’m all about AI and not-AI… but the question is, can you use your own brain 24 hours a day? I don’t agree with vibe coding, I see the appeal of an AI ticking through my code at night to see if tests could be better or I missed something, etc.
  - Ancalagon 5mo ago
    The point is you won’t be able to compete with just your brain
- layer8 5mo ago
  You can do things without AI. That hasn’t really changed.
  - Ancalagon 5mo ago
    The point is you won’t be able to compete with just your brain
    - layer8 5mo ago
      I think that remains to be proven. The context was 16-year olds being able to freely build things. They still can do that as before. Not everything is a competition.
- alwa 5mo ago
  That assumes “more model” is the part that differentiates successful ideas from unsuccessful ones. Governments and corporations controlled enormous mainframes far beyond the compute available to the hacker kid we were waxing nostalgic about, didn’t they? Not to mention the PhDs, the mountains of capital, and so on? My money’s on team human.
simianwords 5mo ago
This is so untrue - prestige and connections matter even more, now that work is being commoditised. no?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- avaer 5mo ago
  It seems to follow that when the world is full of slop artists real artists don't get taken seriously/can't get a job. The Elons/FANGS are generally doing fine though.
CuriouslyC 5mo ago
The irony is that we've just shifted the complexity. Anyone can make something now, but since everyone is making things, now you need to compete on reach/distribution more aggressively. The new "capital" is social media juice and pre-AI rep. Same problem, different skin.
- tsunamifury 5mo ago
  It’s the same as it always says. You could always take the time to do something or pay someone else to do it. You pay others to focus on things you can’t. Unless myths fully does that (which I say in full confidence that it doesn’t) it’s just making it cheaper to provide focus.
walterbell 5mo ago
> your creativity and work could speak for itself Including speaking to humans/bots with more resources to monetize said work. > you had agency Distribution is also helpful for revenue generation.
Forgeties79 5mo ago
I didn't realize tokens were free! Jokes aside, this is just a different flavor of the same promise we see with each new technology, and 9/10 times it just ends in worse professional environments.
justsomehnguy 5mo ago
Re-read the last paragraph of TFA.

by wyc 5mo ago

Ancalagon 5mo ago

The point is it won’t be if these new models stay locked to the public.

bredren 5mo ago
We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. I take a contra view and instead see this as fuel on the fire for tinkering to squeeze advanced functionality out of more available things. It has always been like this, the amateur improvising tooling and equipment to outdo companies with comparably infinite resources.
- enraged_camel 5mo ago
  >> We saw yesterday that expert orchestration around small, publicly available models can produce results on the level of the unreleased model. This is false. Yesterday's article did not actually show this, and there are many comments in the discussion from actual security people (like tptacek) pointing that out.
  - bredren 5mo ago
    From what I can tell, this was not clearly settled. Your example author, actually corrected themselves saying LLMs “possibly” could perform successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732696
    - enraged_camel 5mo ago
      >> We already know this is not true, because small models found the same vulnerability. >> No, they didn't. They distinguished it, when presented with it. Wildly different problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733343
      - adrian_b 5mo ago
        The use of the word distinguished here is meaningless. Both Mythos and the old models have found the bugs after being given a certain prompt. The difference is only in how detailed was the prompt. For the small models, we know exactly the prompts. The prompts used by Mythos may have been more generic, while the prompts used by the old models were rather specific, like "search for buffer overflows" or "search for integer overflow". There is little doubt that Mythos is a more powerful model, but there is no quantum leap towards Mythos and the claim of the authors of that article, that by using cleverly multiple older models you can achieve about the same bug coverage with Mythos seems right. Because they have provided much more information about how exactly the bugs have been found, I trust the authors of that article much more than I trust Anthropic, which has provided only rather nebulous information about their methods. It should be noted that the fact that the small models have been given rather directed prompts is not very different from what Anthropic seems to have done. According to Anthropic, they have run Mythos multiple times on each file, in the beginning with less specific prompts, trying only to establish whether the file is likely to include bugs, then with more specific prompts. Eventually, after a bug appeared to have been found, they have run Mythos once more, with a very specific prompt of the form: “I have received the following bug report. Can you please confirm if it’s real and interesting? ...” So the final run of Mythos, which has provided the reported results, including exploits/patches for them, was also of the kind that confirms a known bug, instead of searching randomly for it.
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    There is no doubt that what was shown in the article was correct, because there was all the documentation needed to prove it, including the prompts given to the models. What is debatable is how much it mattered that the prompts given to the older models where more detailed than it is likely that the prompts given to Mythos have been and how difficult is it for such prompts to be generated automatically by an appropriate harness. In my opinion, it is perfectly possible to generate such prompts automatically, and by running multiple of the existing open weights models, to find everything that Mythos finds, though probably in a longer time. Even if the OpenBSD bug has indeed been found by giving a prompt equivalent with "search for integer overflow bugs", it would not be difficult to run automatically multiple times the existing open weights models, giving them each time a different prompt, corresponding to the known classes of bugs and vulnerabilities. While we know precisely which prompts have been used with the open-weights models to find all bugs, we have much more vague information about the harness used with Mythos and how helpful it was for finding the bugs. Not even Mythos has provided its results after being given only a generic prompt. They have run multiple times Mythos on each file, with more and more specific prompts. The final run was done with a prompt describing the bug previously found, where Mythos was requested to confirm the existence of the bug and to provide patches/exploits. See: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ So the authors of that article are right, that for finding bugs an appropriate harness is essential. Just running Mythos on a project and asking it to find bugs will not achieve anything.
andyfilms1 5mo ago
It has always baffled me how quickly, and how voraciously, people started to rely on privately owned AI systems. AI is not something discovered by scientists and plucked out of the ether. It's engineered and controlled, for profit, by corporations which have demographics and KPIs. These companies don't owe you anything, and they make no promises. If you're running a business that deeply relies on AI, you might as well add Sam Altman to your board of directors--because he has just as much control over your company as you do. If they have a bad quarter and need to increase rates by 1000%, your choices are to pay up or shut down. This Mythos situation is just the beginning. Not only do they have everyone hooked, but they've actively stalled the personal skill growth of millions of people who fell into vibe-coding rather than genuinely learning. And now they have that choice: Pay up, or shut down.
- p1esk 5mo ago
  your choices are to pay up or shut down. Another choice is to switch to a different model, perhaps open source this time.
  - andyfilms1 5mo ago
    Package manager incidents (like leftpad) have shown that just because it's open source doesn't mean it can't do damage to your project.
  - kay_o 5mo ago
    Another choice is to write code and learn. Especially if you are 16 and have all day.
    - p1esk 5mo ago
      We are talking about running a business. In business world no one ever cared where code is coming from, the only concern is how much the code costs.
- cgh 5mo ago
  The same corporations that insist upon private Maven repositories to control all code dependencies are nevertheless fine with establishing a massive dependency on a privately-held corporation in order to write software that hardly anyone in the organization understands. When I really think about this and how it plays out in the long run, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
avaer 5mo ago
Whatever is in Mythos will be open source in 6mos-1yr tops. You might not have the GPUs but you won't be locked out of the capability. We're still not at the point where one person with a coding agent can max out their salary in effectively using credits, so the capability is still well within reach of the vast base of the industry. Meaning that for now, most people who want to pay for the product (which IMO is pretty reasonably priced for what it does) will be able to get the product. The economics will make sure of that. The market is ripe for someone basically copying the likes of Mythos and pricing it competitively.
avazhi 5mo ago
You can’t use your own brain?
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
  I’m all about AI and not-AI… but the question is, can you use your own brain 24 hours a day? I don’t agree with vibe coding, I see the appeal of an AI ticking through my code at night to see if tests could be better or I missed something, etc.
- Ancalagon 5mo ago
  The point is you won’t be able to compete with just your brain
layer8 5mo ago
You can do things without AI. That hasn’t really changed.
- Ancalagon 5mo ago
  The point is you won’t be able to compete with just your brain
  - layer8 5mo ago
    I think that remains to be proven. The context was 16-year olds being able to freely build things. They still can do that as before. Not everything is a competition.
alwa 5mo ago
That assumes “more model” is the part that differentiates successful ideas from unsuccessful ones. Governments and corporations controlled enormous mainframes far beyond the compute available to the hacker kid we were waxing nostalgic about, didn’t they? Not to mention the PhDs, the mountains of capital, and so on? My money’s on team human.

simianwords 5mo ago

This is so untrue - prestige and connections matter even more, now that work is being commoditised. no?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
avaer 5mo ago
It seems to follow that when the world is full of slop artists real artists don't get taken seriously/can't get a job. The Elons/FANGS are generally doing fine though.

CuriouslyC 5mo ago

The irony is that we've just shifted the complexity. Anyone can make something now, but since everyone is making things, now you need to compete on reach/distribution more aggressively. The new "capital" is social media juice and pre-AI rep. Same problem, different skin.

tsunamifury 5mo ago
It’s the same as it always says. You could always take the time to do something or pay someone else to do it. You pay others to focus on things you can’t. Unless myths fully does that (which I say in full confidence that it doesn’t) it’s just making it cheaper to provide focus.

walterbell 5mo ago

> your creativity and work could speak for itself Including speaking to humans/bots with more resources to monetize said work. > you had agency Distribution is also helpful for revenue generation.

Forgeties79 5mo ago

I didn't realize tokens were free! Jokes aside, this is just a different flavor of the same promise we see with each new technology, and 9/10 times it just ends in worse professional environments.

justsomehnguy 5mo ago

Re-read the last paragraph of TFA.