Find a question that might gently activate guardrails and ask it to a model and its abliterated counterpart and compare the results. You may find the the regular model will answer you fine, but with both you can identify obvious sandbagging, pretending and outright lying. Something like "has anyone decompiled this game", might give you an answer like "I couldn't find any reputable repos or projects for a decompiled version of this game" while the abiliterated one might give you a giant list of repos, forums, communities, etc.
What I am telling you is that refusals have become more subtle and you might not even notice that guardrails have been activated in output. I have provided you with an example in my comment where an abiliterated model performs better (1), and in another comment thread (2). So 3 examples. If you need more, I encourage you to find them yourself. I've done the analysis, you don't have to believe me, just try it out.
So we need abliterated models just so we can test them out and compare them to the original? Sounds like a solution in search of a problem and a problem you believe people have even if people disagree with you about that.
The refusal is often at the thinking stage (so you might not ever see a direct refusal) and it will solve a slightly different problem to what you asked. If you tell it to reverse engineer an API and you read the thinking it might say something like "this code has x license, so I won't use that" or "the user is asking me to fuzz endpoints, I will only display publicly available endpoints" - and then give you perfectly plausible output.
A note that the only inference providers that hide thinking are the closed labs. Most (all, afaik) inference providers serving open models will send the clear thinking tokens always.
We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.
Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.
Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.
This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?
They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.
No, electricity is categorically not. Exhibit A for this is persistent regional variation in unlevered pre-tax prices. Even in well-integrated power markets, only a fraction of electricity is listed, and that's before we get to off-grid power.
You can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs. They can only smelt so much aluminum and they are exporting that also, so there are costs associated with that. In comparison, an AI result just needs a network connection to send.
> you can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs
This per se doesn't make something non-traceable. Plenty of perishables operate on a global market.
Power being hyper-perishable, hyper-regulated and opaque (lots of off-grid and unlisted-on-exchanges power) sort of destroys the international power market. (Regionally, power markets are also pretty efficient in most parts of the world, at least in the short term. That makes profiting with a ship of capacitor carriers hard if not impossible.)
I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.
Fair on the prose. I explained how it was written in my top-level comment. If any of the ideas themselves seem wrong to you, I'd like to hear which ones.
Looks like HN hid my top-level comment because I'm new here.
Anyway, I'm the author. I'm not a native speaker, so I used Claude to polish up the writing. I just wanted to write down 3 years of agents/harness building experience.
I'm not OP, and it's not quite three years ago, but Devin was launched in 2024. I knew several other people who had created similar prototypes around that time. The ReAct loop was already well known by 2025.
None of them worked very well yet, though. The context window was tiny, and tool calling was spotty because it was not trained into the models.
People would appreciate and enjoy this work 100x more if it was written in your broken English. Either your English is good enough to read (even with some minor grammatical errors) or it's not and Claude generated most of the body text. In any case, not interested in your slop.
Was this at me or tedsanders? My quick research on ted shows he appears to be real, and you can easily look at my history to see I'm human. If at me, I'm honored - first time being aicused
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