There are two very different questions here: is it good to withhold, and is that sensible for OpenAI to withhold? I think a lot of people on HN view restricting

There are two very different questions here: is it good to withhold, and is that sensible for OpenAI to withhold? I think a lot of people on HN view restricting GPT as incoherent by OpenAI, where they might not for another group. OpenAI's raison d'etre was democratizing access to AI tools, and preventing them from being abused by concentrated powers like governments. If replicating GPT-2 is trivial for state actors but prohibitive for hobbyists and other private citizens, it's creating the same issue Musk described OpenAI as setting out to oppose. Even the general idea of treating AI tools as hazardous-by-default goes a long way to validating the project's original critics.