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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Not hard to be a fast follower. Lots of companies are ~6-9 months behind. Reaching the actual bleeding edge is much harder.
The gap between grok and Gemini to Claude and chatgpt suggests that yes it is that hard.
Their release post was on HN recently. The comments seemed to think that it was similar to OpenRouter, not an actual model.
Did Anthropic give you third-party benchmarks? Is that what you said to them? Yes, they're important, but the attitude is wrong.
Anthropic always publishes 3p benchmarks every time they announce a new model
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.
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.
The article talks about 1 Chinese and 1 Japanese model.
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?
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.
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).
Patriotism makes people biased. Better to not hold an identity in this area.
YES! Now things become even more interesting. US, your move.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> a TAM that consists almost solely of developers
That’s the wrong assumption. These models are good at office docs too.
> 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.
But you can do office docs work with way cheaper models
They're passable at those. And still no moat.
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
Propaganda? Pay for “facts” to be placed in the model?
Excellent. I'm very thankful the asian/chinese don't give a fuck about the US government. It feels good to have a competitor.
Where can I get the API?
Through their website.
So now as a regular American we are behind because gatekeepers saying super intelligence is too scary
It was bound to happen soon.
People who are shielded by walls are always surprised when the same walls shield the people outside from them
It is scary.
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.
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.
> 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
You asked where the danger was, the response told you that disrupting the status quo can be dangerous.
[dead]
Are we supposed to be impressed? They distilled Anthropic’s models and pat themselves on the back for it. Pathetic.
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.
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.
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.
You made a new account to post this?
[dead]
+1
Please use the upvote button instead of doing this.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...
Seems like a bit of karmic justice.
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.
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].
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
they mined the internet first. now they’re upset someone brought a shovel.
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.
> 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...
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.