"Safety" is a marketing technique that Sam Altman has chosen to use. Journalists/media loved it when he said "GPT 2 might be too dangerous to release" - it got

"Safety" is a marketing technique that Sam Altman has chosen to use. Journalists/media loved it when he said "GPT 2 might be too dangerous to release" - it got him a ton of free coverage, and made his company seem soooo cool. Harping on safety also constantly reinforces the idea that LLMs are fundamentally different from other text-prediction algorithms and almost-AGI - again, good for his wallet.