Are we all cooked?
Anthropic’s new, yet-to-be-released model Mythos, has scared policy-makers enough that they’ve decided to meet to figure out what to do about it.
The main threat from Mythos is that it can, along with doing the usual LLM stuff better, identify and exploit vulnerabilities in every operating system and software when directed by a user to do so. It’s every hacker’s wet dream, and upon release, it will likely be used to do exactly what Bessent and Powell are worried about.
The scary thing is that Mythos is the first model to be trained on Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU racks. More models as powerful, if not more, are on the way…and we haven’t even gotten to models trained on the latest Vera Rubins. OpenAI is in a neck-to-neck battle to outcompete Anthropic, particularly in the areas of coding where Anthropic has excelled. The only problem is that Sam Altman and OpenAI can’t be trusted with AI safety.
Silicon Valley will tell you that AI will drastically improve the livelihoods of people and boost GDP and productivity. Businesses and industries will get spun up that we couldn’t comprehend of in the past. I have no doubt that people are benefiting from AI at an individual or firm-wide level, but in the equity markets, I’m concerned that a lot of the positives of the AI boom (chips, memory, components, LLMs) are already fully valued whereas the downside caused by disruption (software stocks, private equity and private credit) have only started to materialize. Now we have one more thing to worry about - can the leading LLM providers continue to improve their models without exposing all of us to cybersecurity risk?
I’m getting a lot of mixed messages out of the Strait of Hormuz:
Positive: The ceasefire proposal was revised and brings the US and Iran closer together in terms. Israel has approved direct negotiations with Lebanon (while continuing to attack them). At the moment it looks like the summit in Pakistan is going ahead as scheduled on Saturday.
Negative: A continuation of US military assets getting airlifted to the Gulf. Saudi capacity in the East-West pipeline has been cut by 700k bpd. The Strait of Hormuz remains very much closed, and Trump is not happy. Even if it reopens, it won’t be until June for flows to restart back to normal. Drones are still hitting Iran.
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