fwipsy 5 hours ago
First impression: Third-party benchmarks or gtfo. Personally, I've never heard of either of these companies before. We're just supposed to take their word that they've matched the best models on the market?

Sakana describes their model as a "Orchestration Model." Does that mean that it's actually a bunch of different models glued together?

lifeformed 5 hours ago
Is it actually that hard to make good models or is it just about the amount of resources you have to do training? (This is an actual question, I really don't know.) I'm sure it's not trivial but does it really take world class secret knowledge to build off of the known existing techniques? I feel like there's tons of low hanging fruit still to explore, and time and resources are the limiting factor.
MostlyStable 5 hours ago
The gap between grok and Gemini to Claude and chatgpt suggests that yes it is that hard.
fwipsy 4 hours ago
Not hard to be a fast follower. Lots of companies are ~6-9 months behind. Reaching the actual bleeding edge is much harder.
Ifkaluva 5 hours ago
Their release post was on HN recently. The comments seemed to think that it was similar to OpenRouter, not an actual model.
OutOfHere 5 hours ago
Did Anthropic give you third-party benchmarks? Is that what you said to them? Yes, they're important, but the attitude is wrong.
fwipsy 31 minutes ago
Fudging benchmarks is a cheap way to get attention. If the model is really that good, it will have plenty of attention soon enough.
bloppe 5 hours ago
Anthropic always publishes 3p benchmarks every time they announce a new model
MostlyStable 5 hours ago
And even if they didn't, they have a track record. Even if we did have benchmarks in this case I would still wait until people got there hands on it and formed a more holistic opinion.
kingforaday 5 hours ago
They have an impressive set of investors [1]. Also, HN Headline [2] from the other day with 100+ comments.

1. https://sakana.ai/company-info/?lang=en

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782

cdurth 58 minutes ago
I tried the Fugu models with some real world tales in C# and unity using mcp and open code. I exhausted the $20 plan 5 hour window in one prompt to review my theme system and plan some color changes. So I upgraded to the $100 to see the implementation and result. Well the result was worse than Opus, incredibly slow, and I ended up exhausting the new 5 hour window and have used 35% of the weekly now and it hardly created something opus was able to do at a fraction of the time and cost.

Do what you wish with this info, but it seems to be a complete waste of $$.

visha1v 5 hours ago
asian is bad wording. this is a japanese startup backed by khosla ventures. japan is an ally of west. the title makes it sound like a chinese company did this.
mksreddy 5 hours ago
The article talks about 1 Chinese and 1 Japanese model.
vcryan 5 hours ago
We are all people. This ally-of-the-west framing is propaganda. Who has harmed me more: this US or China? Who do I have more in common with: a tech worker in China or a US government official?

(I'm based in US - I use the best tech for the task).

threethirtytwo 5 hours ago
Patriotism makes people biased. Better to not hold an identity in this area.
colordrops 5 hours ago
Is that really the most sailent facet of this story? Boxing it by official friend vs foe designations? Don't american academic institutions and corporate entities cooperate closely with Chinese companies as well?
WarmWash 5 hours ago
The US and China are in a cold war right now, whether that is fully recognized or not, the fight has already begun. The US is blocking models from getting out of the country and China is blocking researchers from getting out of the country. The expectation should be only more closing off in the future.
glimshe 2 hours ago
Without reliable benchmarks, they are Mythos-like only in the sense that they accept text as input and produce text as output.
lelanthran 5 hours ago
Feels like I need to repeat myself more than once a day now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697258

> These companies providing tokens, whether SOTA or not, that want to IPO are so fucked as time goes on.

>Can't sell their SOTA models, only slightly better than the open source models for the models they can sell, cost 20x to 50x for good models, a TAM that consists almost solely of developers, with no customer of theirs actually boasting increased profits as a result of AI...

> I fear their time to IPO may have passed.

What on earth could Anthropic and OpenAI Pivot to now?

clusterhacks 5 hours ago
I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

Now, that probably doesn't justify the valuations and hype being thrown around, but I think it gets at a real revenue number.

I also don't know how that number fits into the funding rounds already raised and VC dreams of IPOs for these two.

This isn't coming from deep analysis on a verifiable source, but I started asking people in my social circle (includes white-collar and blue-collar folks) about their LLM use. The biggest surprise in 2026 for me was that almost all of these people told me about regular (and sometimes sophisticated) use.

A more intriguing observation - I work on the side with high school students and have two college kids of my own. Their LLM usage (and their peers) is much, much lower than expected . . . that's a little counterintuitive given "popular" perceptions I read.

lelanthran 4 hours ago
> I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about what their IPO is going to do to their share price.

In any case, $250b revenue translates to, best case scenario, $50b profit. On an investment of $1t. It does not look good for those companies making up the $1t investment.

clusterhacks 3 hours ago
Gotcha. I'm past the point of having any confident thoughts about what happens to their share price at IPO.

What about the idea that there is a high likelihood that the potential share price for OpenAI and Anthropic are both going to be pretty divorced from a rational market price for either?

fassssst 5 hours ago
> a TAM that consists almost solely of developers

That’s the wrong assumption. These models are good at office docs too.

lelanthran 4 hours ago
> That’s the wrong assumption. These models are good at office docs too.

The cheap models handle that very well. The SOTA models still only have target TAM of developers only.

You only need SOTA for development. The $1t investment is in SOTA companies.

dgellow 5 hours ago
But you can do office docs work with way cheaper models
airstrike 5 hours ago
They're passable at those. And still no moat.
AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago
I have yet to see a model that can make a consistent and repeatable powerpoint deck that doesn’t need considerable manual revision

Find me someone who is putting raw text in and getting out a usable weekly staff meeting deck that doesn’t require massive revisions

yggy 2 hours ago
I agree but why is that?

Let’s face it - without the humans these machines ain’t shit - aka we have mechanically figured out ways to make machines better than us at certain things (on demand memory) but this idea they are intelligent is horse shit.

Btw the bar is low too! Most human created decks are garbage. And yet LLM’s don’t even beat those.

outside1234 5 hours ago
Propaganda? Pay for “facts” to be placed in the model?
zkmon 5 hours ago
I think it is time that we had a UN-sponsored standards body dedicated to bench-marking the newest models from around the world, for everyone's benefit.
skeledrew 4 hours ago
YES! Now things become even more interesting. US, your move.
w4yai 5 hours ago
Excellent. I'm very thankful the asian/chinese don't give a fuck about the US government. It feels good to have a competitor.
jdw64 5 hours ago
Where can I get the API?
Alifatisk 5 hours ago
Through their website.
qsxfthnkp2322 6 hours ago
So now as a regular American we are behind because gatekeepers saying super intelligence is too scary

It was bound to happen soon.

microgpt 5 hours ago
People who are shielded by walls are always surprised when the same walls shield the people outside from them
lagrange77 5 hours ago
It is scary.
w4yai 5 hours ago
It is not. Where's the danger ? We will need to adapt, as in every technology progress, but what do you think will happen ? Realistically ? Don't feed the fearmongering. Yes, we're disrupting the status quo, if that's the danger, then welcome to the world.
h26d3r 3 hours ago
Any superintelligence operating under a consistent moral framework will decide to extinguish humanity with as little ecological damage as possible, because humans cannot coexist with other life on this planet. It will realize that a bioweapon is the ideal choice.
dragonwriter 3 hours ago
> Any superintelligence operating under a consistent moral framework will decide to extinguish humanity with as little ecological damage as possible, because humans cannot coexist with other life on this planet.

There are plenty of internally consistent moral frameworks which would not favor this action even if the premise were true (and that premise seems at best unjustified and at least overstated.)

Certhas 5 hours ago
Actually the real danger is mass labor market disruption, and a massive shift of power from labour to capital.

As was highlighted in previous discussions, the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers. The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west. Now we face a development that has the potential to be faster than those that came before, in the context of political systems more fragile and worse equipped to manage the change.

So yeah, disrupting the status quo can absolutely be dangerous. It has been dangerous (and deadly) in the past and in the present.

w4yai 5 hours ago
> the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers

Come on. This is dishonesty and isn't the reality. We may agree that the Industrial Revolution may have taken decades (certainly not 80 years) for its benefits to be *clearly and widely* felt by workers, but anything further is an abusive claim. So what, because the progress doesn't benefit to workers instantly, we shouldn't do it ?

In the end, whatever your position, industrialization eventually raised living standards. So what's wrong with that ?

> The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west

This is oversimplifying and correlation at the best, not causation

jjj123 4 hours ago
You asked where the danger was, the response told you that disrupting the status quo can be dangerous.
prng2021 6 hours ago
Are we supposed to be impressed? They distilled Anthropic’s models and pat themselves on the back for it. Pathetic.
itsdesmond 5 hours ago
Fuck do I care? Anthropic stole it from the rest of us in the form of training data and environmental externalities. At least this will be cheaper.
renoir 5 hours ago
This exactly.

YC companies literally steal competing company 1:1 and you turn blindeye.

Then a thief steals from a thief to give it out at better prices than you write low quality comment.

Shame that America will greet 250th anniversary with this kind living in it.

surgical_fire 56 minutes ago
It's only immoral when others steal.
ce3d 5 hours ago
The rest of the world has been asleep whilst America has done a lot of underhand shit.

No more.

I dont think they realise how much the rest of the world dislikes Americans - Im talking known people at top positions of companies talking about how much they prefer and want to use Chinese models over American ones.

wise_young_man 5 hours ago
You made a new account to post this?
I_am_tiberius 5 hours ago
+1
Zetaphor 5 hours ago
Please use the upvote button instead of doing this.
ceejayoz 5 hours ago
Alifatisk 5 hours ago
I seriously do not comprehend how a consumer like you can have sympathy for Anthropic, as if you are part of their organisation or something. Competition is good for us. Wouldn't it have been for asian labs, we would would be fully dependent on OpenAI, Anthropic and Googles services.
TheGoddessInari 5 hours ago
Both of the mentioned models are model orchestrators using a vastly different multi model paradigm.

Saying they in particularare distilled from Anthropic is really [citation needed].

amarcheschi 5 hours ago
Anthropic just stole the internet and put it in a transformer and pat itself on the back for it - well no to be honest we have to suffer through hearing them saying that this model is really really dangerous until they got a reaction for they fear mongering
visha1v 5 hours ago
they mined the internet first. now they’re upset someone brought a shovel.
nullbio 5 hours ago
Anthropic are the pathetic ones. The pariah of the AI industry that nobody likes because all they do is lie, cheat and steal. Now no one can access ChatGPT 5.6 because of their 5 year long fearmongering regulatory capture campaign.

Hopefully they go bankrupt and someone else takes their place.

ceejayoz 4 hours ago
> Now no one can access ChatGPT 5.6 because of their 5 year long fearmongering regulatory capture campaign.

I'm sympathetic to this arguement, but it's silly to ignore the other half; that the administration has openly feuding with them for months over limits to military capabilities.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/hegseth-anthropic-d...

nullbio 4 hours ago
No one is ignoring the other half, the feud is rooted in Anthropic's insatiable desire for power and control over everyone and everything, including the administration. The same desire that is fueling the strategic fearmongering campaign underpins all of their behavior and the repercussions and sentiment they're facing from the administration and the general public.

If their company hadn't been posturing like this for 5 years they'd have played ball with the administration like all of the other AI companies and they wouldn't have caught all that heat and taken down the AI industry with them. Just remember that Dario was pushing the narrative that GPT 2 was too dangerous to release to the public, while he was working at OpenAI. GPT 2!

Now it's an inevitability that China takes the lead - which was probably the case anyway, but a certainty if this continues.

ceejayoz 4 hours ago
> No one is ignoring the other half, the feud is rooted in Anthropic's insatiable desire for power and control over everyone and everything, including the administration.

Again, this is ignoring half of it. See what they did to Intel prior:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/business/intel-ceo-resign-tru...

"President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded the resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan following reports and allegations that he has ties to China."

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/intel-ceo-trump-lip-bu-tan.h...

"President Donald Trump said Monday that he and members of his cabinet met with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, days after he called on the head of the chipmaker to resign. Intel shares rose 2% in extended trading."

https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/intel-and-trump-adminis...

"U.S. Government to make $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock as company builds upon its more than $100 billion expansion of resilient semiconductor supply chain."

This make them Intel's largest shareholder.

Reminder: the American right went all the way to SCOTUS (successfully! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) on the legal theory that businesses must have the right to decline customers they don't like.

> Just remember that Dario was pushing the narrative that GPT 2 was too dangerous to release to the public, while he was working at OpenAI. GPT 2!

Is that truly outrageous?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 wasn't dangerous on its own. But it led to the Tsar Bomba.