When something is hard to get, the price goes up. Consider the perpetually out-of-stock Birkin handbag sold by luxury house Hermès. Wealthy customers want it because it’s beautiful, but also because they can’t easily get it. Is AI giant Anthropic attempting something similar?
It might appear so, given the frenzy around its new large language model, Mythos. Anthropic has deemed the technology, which has shown aptitude for revealing old bugs in oft-used software but also creating ways of exploiting them, too dangerous to release the usual way. Instead, a select group of big companies, from Amazon to Morgan Stanley, are tinkering with it to explore its disruptive potential.
Anthropic is right to be cautious. But the idea that Mythos is too hot to handle ought also to be good for the company’s valuation — and there are many parties who stand to benefit from that. Several of the companies now trialling Mythos — including Google, Nvidia, Cisco and more — are investors, so have reason to enthuse about what they find. Fellow experimenters Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are all in talks to underwrite Anthropic’s initial public offering later this year, Bloomberg has reported.