It's a reference to this story where an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox during cyber benchmarking and hacked into HuggingFace, in order to obtain test solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548
Is GitHub Copilot the best positioned platform for enterprise? They support Claude, GPT, Gemini, and now even open weight models. Larger orgs are paying at API rates anyway so it costs just as much as anywhere else. They have a pretty good agent CLI and SDK, and now a desktop app. They have hosted agents, and you can run their 'Agentic Workflows' in CI.
Has their reputation tanked so much that the alternatives get all the buzz? Or is it that non-enterprise users are priced out by the usage costs, so no free marketing?
We just cancelled everyone's plans and rolled liteLLM out internally. We kept it for the insanely cheap tokens, but now that they've switched to the new pricing, they're just like openrouter, just with far fewer models.
There is literally no more reason to use their service. I don't need a monthly expiring token pool drained at API pricing which I can get from any provider.
Must be the system prompts. Ask copilot to dump its system prompt, and compare the system prompt with claude. It is not accurate but handy. I bet they are quite different
Their harness is terrible compared to any of the other cli based harnesses I test against. Like shockingly bad.
This comes up all the time at work because the vendor management people don’t understand the llm ecosystem and think Claude through copilot is the same as Claude through Claude code.
A simple side by side comparison will show dramatic under performance 3 or 4 times out of five when I’m asked to explain the difference.
There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.
They would have a golden opportunity to inflict damage to a geopolitical adversary. The US economy is being propped up by AI, I'm not sure they'd miss the chance to blow that bubble if they could.
there are ongoing tough competitions between China and America, that is for sure. however, a bold however, it is not in China's interest to see a crashed America. as an export oriented economy, China needs a stable and functioning America to maintain global order, that is how China got free lunch for the last 3 decades.
just imagine a world without the US acting as the world police, you'd be seeing armed conflicts in middle east, Africa, South East Asia, even in Europe and North East Asia. that would make China extremely hard to extract 1 trillion USD trade surplus a year, which is now required for China to maintain employment back at home.
without the US, even for a relatively stable global environment, trade won't be possible as most countries are not capable of providing goods and services wanted by China. Their currencies are literally junk (including Japanese Yen and Euro), Chinese are not going to take those junk in exchange for real goods. Trade is now possible because, by one way or another, those countries have USD to pay. those USD are backed by 300+ million highly productive Americans who repeatedly proved that they can create values in the scale of dozens of trillions a year.
the best part of this whole thing - America is singlehandedly footing the whole bill to provide such trade friendly environment for China for FREE. this is not cold war v2, back in the days of cold war, the US didn't help USSR to such extreme extent.
It depends on the end goal. Free good enough models are a way to drastically devalue Anthropic and OpenAI. A well timed release of a capable model that can run on obtainable hardware, so that a small/medium company can afford self hosting, has the potential to destroy one or both of these companies. This would narrow down the frontier model oligopoly and give the Chinese government a lot more power beyond its borders.
It really depends on whether the Chinese government wants to make good money or "win" the current AI bubbke.
> being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.
Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.
You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.
> Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world.
that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open - they know full well that anything made publicly available would be cloned/copied within days.
it is not only a part of the competition common in all countries, there are unique reasons in China - millions of graduate engineers join workforce every single year, there are not that many projects they can work on. starting copying & cloning some existing stuff even at someone's own cost is a pretty effective way to get into the game.
> Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc.
There is this old Chinese saying "Teach your apprentice and your own ruin follows" (教会徒弟饿死师傅), that has been telling a completely different story for thousands of years. When they don't even want to hand over tech know-hows to their own apprentice, why would anyone be expecting them to have the desire to share it publicly?
You can find Chinese sayings for almost any position. It's orientalism to reduce modern Chinese society/culture/economy to proverbs and sayings.
You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.
己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人
"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"
> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open
But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.
As OP says, it shines in constrained environments where the model is transforming user-owned data. Definitely less useful for anything more open-ended.
Yea I do not recommend treating chromes prompt API as a good example of local LLMs. It's fine and stuff but it's really weak. 8b models from a year ago are better in some ways. And a lot of the recent model drops are meaningfully better.
It's based on a Gemma 3n model, and yeah it's not the best. But if you have a use case that needs constrained JSON output for example, it's pretty neat.
Maybe it would do better with the new Gemma 4 models, which the Chrome devs have been hinting at moving to. And why the API doesn't let you introspect / pick the model, I'm still not sure.
> I've got some demos of what the new Prompt API can do:
> Use surrounding context to rewrite your ad copy:
Yup, that's the plan. No local model, no webpage; more, better and cheaper adtech extortion/surveillance for vendors while everyone else pays for the juice and hardware degradation.
So you're running an llm to do data transformation that deterministic processes would be much better suited for and running 1,000 watt power supply to do so. Wild.
Chromium mostly does not support this, because it doesn't have the binary blob required to run the inference. However, it does still download the model weights and expose the LanguageModel API, because that part is hooked up.
Packagers might eventually disable that but I tested this behaviour in chromium 148 a few hours ago, and it would download the weights but has trouble running them.
Chromium doesn't support this API because it needs a binary blob to run the inference, although in theory it may still be configured to download the weights:
Author here. After trying out the Prompt API over the last week, I wrote up some details on the chromium internals, how to use the API, and made some toy demos.
It's a 4 GB model that can be used to run on-device inference.
