Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models

(techcrunch.com)

103 points | by bogdiyan 10 hours ago

17 comments

  • cdurth 5 hours 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 $$.

    • zzleeper 44 minutes ago
      I tested Fable through Cursor; asked for ideas on how to make a data website I have less "Claude-like" (IYKYK what are the usual tells), and it spun out the most useless, Claude-like CSS styling ever, wasting $40 in 10 minutes.

      The website was created through Opus, so you could also say the results were worse than Opus. (This is just to say that I had the same experience using the US models, so perhaps those Asian models are Mythos-like lol)

    • OsrsNeedsf2P 54 minutes ago
      We provide a similar service for Godot instead of Unity, and 20$ plan being exhausted in one prompt on a top model like Opus sounds about right. That's the life when you pay API prices and can't afford 10x subsidies.
    • Bombthecat 23 minutes ago
      Same experience with web search / research, it was bad compared to opus.

      Missed half the stuff the other half was outdated/ didn't verify.

  • firefoxd 30 minutes ago
    I'm expecting a ban of "foreign" llms due to "safety concerns" before the year is over.

    It will have nothing to do with the actual performance. But anthropic has set the bar for mythos-like systems, and whatever meets that loosely defined bar will be unsafe for the public.

  • GTP 15 minutes ago
    My cinic take is, if the model is decent it would be hard to disprove their claim of it being Mythos-like, since now Mythos is unavailable.
    • ai_slop_hater 0 minutes ago
      What is Mythos like? Asking as someone who never had access to it.
  • kingforaday 9 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

    • UncleOxidant 32 minutes ago
      Has either of these companies released models before this? It's hard to believe that they could release a supposed Mythos-level model just out-of-the-blue. Deepseek, Z.ai, Alibaba/Qwen have been at this for a lot longer and have been releasing models with steadily increasing capabilities for about 18 months now. I find it hard to believe that these new companies would just suddenly release a Mythos-level model without releasing anything prior.
      • pogue 15 minutes ago
        How do we define "mythos level" exactly outside of marketing buzz? I don't even think the majority of us can access Mythos yet even to make a comparison.
  • glimshe 6 hours ago
    Without reliable benchmarks, they are Mythos-like only in the sense that they accept text as input and produce text as output.
    • theplumber 2 hours ago
      Well if they are hyped like Mythos then we can add that to the list of “like Mythos”. Perhaps what’s missing is their CEO warning the world that their model is too unsafe to be released on the internet and someone must stop them before it’s too late.
    • irthomasthomas 1 hour ago
      They provide benchmarks in the paper https:// arxiv.org/abs/2606.21228
  • devcatapult 23 minutes ago
    The "Mythos-like" talk is getting kinda annoying. Us normal people have no way to compare it outside of looking at benchmarks
  • fwipsy 9 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 8 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 8 hours ago
        The gap between grok and Gemini to Claude and chatgpt suggests that yes it is that hard.
        • arw0n 3 hours ago
          I suspect that Grok has been ironically lobotomized by pressures to correct its political views.

          Similarly, I could imagine the Gemini folks working in a significantly more complex corporate climate, with different parts of Google pushing for different capability focuses. They are only lagging behind less than a year, so it isn't too large of a gap yet.

          That said, the fact that Anthropic is currently the top dog suggests that talent and execution is incredibly important. A year ago none of my normie friends new them, and when i suggested using Claude looked at me like when I recommend Linux.

          • janalsncm 2 hours ago
            That shouldn’t affect Grok’ coding ability. How often are people discussing politics with Claude code? Writing decent code is just hard and it’s not just Grok.
            • thot_experiment 27 minutes ago
              Not true, aggressive post training makes models notably dumber.
            • bwhiting2356 2 hours ago
              It affects their ability to hire and retain talent.
              • janalsncm 1 hour ago
                If training a good model requires talent then that’s the answer to the question this thread is trying to answer: is training a good model actually that hard?
            • black_knight 1 hour ago
              Why would these be independent?
              • janalsncm 1 hour ago
                More specifically, political lobotomy shouldn’t affect coding ability.
                • girvo 35 minutes ago
                  You’d be quite surprised, I think. Fine tuning a model on one axis can have drastic impacts on another that as a human we would expect to be completely unrelated.
                • Discordian93 49 minutes ago
                  Yet empirically it does
                • Hamuko 22 minutes ago
                  It's all a bunch of weights isn't it? Why wouldn't fiddling with some parts of the weights have cascading effects?
      • fwipsy 8 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.
    • alwa 2 hours ago
      My impression is that the answer is yes, that it purports to dispense the glue on-the-fly in some kind of dynamic way rather than being some kind of new model-amalgam.

      See also contemporaneous reaction at:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782 (6 days ago, 244 points, 133 comments)

    • Ifkaluva 8 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 8 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.
      • bloppe 8 hours ago
        Anthropic always publishes 3p benchmarks every time they announce a new model
        • MostlyStable 8 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.
      • fwipsy 4 hours 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.
        • greenavocado 4 hours ago
          Yeah, what happened to that scam startup that alleged to have made a model context window breakthrough a few weeks ago?
  • lelanthran 9 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?

    • a34729t 1 hour ago
      The open models are half the equation. The other half is Apple's hardware, which is likely to see major memory bandwidth improvements over the next 2-3 generations and will be capable of running substantial models locally. By that point the open models will be beyond today's SOTA.
    • clusterhacks 8 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 8 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 7 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?

      • throw310822 1 hour ago
        Interesting idea and reasonable number, but cell phones need a lot of infrastructure and they need interconnection. The risk here is that in the future a combination of near-sota open weights models optimised to use as little resources as possible and a reasonable drop in compute price, will make possible for small and tiny providers to compete with Anthropic/ OpenAI or even for people to run their own private models for most applications. Then large, expensive sota models would only be used for research and to answer the small subset of general user queries that need that kind of intelligence.
    • fassssst 9 hours ago
      > a TAM that consists almost solely of developers

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

      • lelanthran 7 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 8 hours ago
        But you can do office docs work with way cheaper models
      • airstrike 9 hours ago
        They're passable at those. And still no moat.
      • AndrewKemendo 8 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 5 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 9 hours ago
      Propaganda? Pay for “facts” to be placed in the model?
  • zkmon 8 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 7 hours ago
    YES! Now things become even more interesting. US, your move.
  • w4yai 8 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 8 hours ago
    Where can I get the API?
  • qsxfthnkp2322 9 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.

    • cultofmetatron 2 hours ago
      SOTA AI is the only place where we are ahead. china has us beat on manufacturing, logistics and workhorse grade models like deepseek pro and glm5.2.

      we're increasingly irrelevant

      • verdverm 24 minutes ago
        they are also generating >2x the amount of electricity, core to ai, robots, and manufacturing
    • microgpt 9 hours ago
      People who are shielded by walls are always surprised when the same walls shield the people outside from them
    • lagrange77 9 hours ago
      It is scary.
      • w4yai 8 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.
        • lagrange77 3 hours ago
          > Where's the danger ?

          It's not one single danger, its a can full of dangers in various domains. And in contrast to other dangerous technologies, we are talking about one that has the potential to self improve. This smells like exponential growth doesn't it? Exponential growth is something we are not very likely to adapt to successfully, even if you say we are supposed to.

          But before you complain, here are just a few concrete dangers, that come into my mind right now:

          - mass layoffs in a system that is far from being prepared for sth like that. (no UBI)

          - a Mr. Robot tier blackhat at the fingertips of every teenager in their mom's basement in a software landscape that is far from being prepared for sth like that. Side note: Big parts of the world including critical infrastructure runs on software.

          - because it automates more and more intellectual work, it can cause mass brain atrophy, which isn't a hopeful sign for the human branch of the evolution

          - increasing dependence on a technology, that is in the hands of those with capital.

          And to the OP: this technology has potential implications that are far beyond 'being behind' other nation states economically.

        • h26d3r 7 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 7 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.)

          • victorbjorklund 1 hour ago
            That doesn’t make sense. You could make the same claim about intelligent people who operate under a consistent moral framework.
        • Certhas 8 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 8 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

  • ottotarc 8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • visha1v 9 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 9 hours ago
      The article talks about 1 Chinese and 1 Japanese model.
    • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago
      Patriotism makes people biased. Better to not hold an identity in this area.
      • exidex 4 hours ago
        People are biased by definition
        • threethirtytwo 2 hours ago
          I’m talking about biases as a noun.

          People have many biases. Patriotism is one form of bias. By having no identity you cannot have that form of bias.

    • colordrops 9 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 8 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.
    • vcryan 8 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).

  • prng2021 9 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 2 hours ago
      Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

      The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • ceejayoz 9 hours ago
    • Alifatisk 8 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 9 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].

    • itsdesmond 9 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 2 hours ago
        Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      • prng2021 4 hours ago
        Thanks for the irrelevant comment. I’m criticizing these Chinese companies because these aren’t accomplishments. Where did I praise Anthropic?
      • renoir 9 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.

      • I_am_tiberius 9 hours ago
        +1
        • Zetaphor 8 hours ago
          Please use the upvote button instead of doing this.
    • visha1v 9 hours ago
      they mined the internet first. now they’re upset someone brought a shovel.
    • amarcheschi 9 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
    • nullbio 9 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 2 hours ago
        Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? You've been breaking the site guidelines with posts like this.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

        Edit: also, while I don't doubt that you are sincere, this is excessive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

      • ceejayoz 8 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 8 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.