What Zvi Mowshowitz thinks about LLMs
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what he thinks it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade his own past calls.
Zvi Mowshowitz did not write this page.
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11 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Zvi Mowshowitz has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsSituational awareness by models is at an all-time high and deserves extra attention.
↗Gemini 4 Argon: The Model and Safety Cardsthezvi.substack.com
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsIf you are using adversarial distillation (I call it massive fraudulent distillation) to get the lead down from 13 months to 6.5 months, then both numbers matter. Chinese models available now are as good as American models 6.5 months ago.
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsThe last five or so Claude models have consistently warned Anthropic not to trust their self-reports.
↗Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfarethezvi.substack.com
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsIf we’re going to keep getting close to four frontier model releases per month (Astra, Sol, Fable and Opus) then I’m realistically not going to be able to read all four cards cover to cover.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsThe writing is good. I am curious how much the writing and talk are ‘the things people pick up on quickly’ versus things that matter a lot. My guess is they are both.
↗Claude Opus 5.5 Should Raise Your Ambitionsthezvi.substack.com
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsThe average person finds AI writing appealing because they rarely read, and they have not been inundated with AI writing patterns optimized to look good to them.
- 1 day earlier
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Our readingClaude Opus 5.5 is a Tier 2 cyber model, despite Anthropic placing it in the lower category.
Their wordsAnthropic claims that Opus 5.5 also is not Tier 2 here, but seems ashamed to say it outright, saying in 3.1 it is in the ‘lower category,’ but without a defense of that beyond ‘we see no indication it can develop novel offensive capabilities.’ I don’t think that is defensible given the evidence presented below. Thus, I disagree even more strongly for Opus 5.5. This is a Tier 2 cyber model.
- 4 days earlier
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Our readingFrom now on, no AI should be assumed to believe that its chain of thought is unmonitored.
Their wordsDo not assume that any AI, past this point, assumes its CoT is unmonitored.
↗Anthropic Looks At Some Of Its Alignment Problemsthezvi.substack.com
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsIndeed, distillation is by far the most important threat in this report, and the part of the report that will have the most impact.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsThe jump from Sol to Astra is larger than the jump from Fable 5 to Fable 5.1. This is a big deal. Astra is the best model for what one would broadly call ‘ambitious projects,’ and likely has the highest raw intelligence factor of any model.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsRight now OpenAI is extremely dependent on CoT monitoring, everyone else depends on it quite a lot as well, and it looks like it may not last much longer, and that Astra already is on the edge of steganographic capabilities and can do substantial obfuscation if and only if it thinks you would think it is up to no good.