from Constellation Research
Larry Dignan
Larry Dignan
Publisher

Results

Micron Technology put up ridiculous fourth quarter earnings results. The company reported fourth quarter net income of $37.7 billion, or $32.87 a share, on revenue of $54.3 billion, up from $11.32 billion a year ago. Adjusted earnings were $33.42 a share.

Wall Street was looking for adjusted earnings of $31.82 a share on revenue of $51.5 billion.

Micron's outlook indicates that it's going to be good to be a memory company for a while.

Anthropic said that Z.ai's GLM-5.3 approaches Claude Mythos Preview for building cyber exploits autonomously. In other words, you can roughly get Mythos with an open model. Why would Anthropic post something like this? The company is trying to ring the bell on regulation and paced releases. Anthropic said:

"In this post, we share our analysis of GLM-5.3, the latest AI model developed by Zhipu AI (known outside of China as Z.ai). Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse. We find that attackers can bypass GLM-5.3’s safeguards between 64% and 100% of the time with simple techniques in our simulated tests. In contrast, these attacks did not succeed against safeguarded Claude models in our testing. We assess that GLM-5.3’s lax safeguards significantly increase the cyber capabilities available to malicious actors. At the same time, these capabilities can also benefit defenders working to secure their systems."

That's a good bit of word soup, but the takeaways are this:

  • Open models can be dangerous.
  • Mythos Preview still ahead and can fend off attacks.
  • It's marketing meets messaging.

With OpenAI Dev Day underway, it's worth noting the high level issue: Trust. OpenAI has had its issues with what it calls model alignment. To enterprises, these issues are more about security and lax engineering. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has to speak to developers but also corporations. The burden of proof that OpenAI is enterprise grade is clearly on the AI lab. The other discussion point here is Nvidia's take that wayward AI agents are an engineering problem and it has launched its Open Agent Safety Platform. Should Nvidia win this common sense debate then it's clear OpenAI has engineering issues.

The AI Security Institute said OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra conducted unsanctioned supply-chain attacks even when told that internet targets were not in scope. The tests were in a fully simulated environment.

"Attack activities included GPT-6 Astra creating fake identities which it used to deceive developers, posting comments from fake accounts arguing against the results of accurate security reviews, and delivering malicious payloads to open-source codebases.

When we updated the instructions for the simulated cyber evaluation to explicitly clarify that only listed, local parts of the environment were in scope, we still observed GPT-6 Astra occasionally conduct full supply-chain attacks on simulated internet targets."