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> It’s really hard to read this as anything other than a desperate attempt to pretend the ai is more capable than it really is. Tale as old as time, they've be

> It’s really hard to read this as anything other than a desperate attempt to pretend the ai is more capable than it really is. Tale as old as time, they've been doing this since GPT-2 which they said was "too dangerous to release".

Barrin92 2y ago
I talked to a Palantir guy at a conference once and he literally told me "I'm happy when the media hypes us up like a James Bond villain because every time the stock price goes up, in reality we mostly just aggregate and clean up data" This is the psychology of every tech hype cycle
- Moru 2y ago
  Tech is by no means alone with this trick. Every press release is free adverticement and should be used like it.
ben_w 2y ago
For thousands of years, people believed that men and women had a different number of ribs. Never bothered to count them. """Release strategy Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code . … This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today … """ - https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ It was the news reporting that it was "too dangerous". If anyone at OpenAI used that description publicly, it's not anywhere I've been able to find it.
- trescenzi 2y ago
  That quote says to me very clearly “we think it’s too dangerous to release” and specifies the reasons why. Then goes on to say “we actually think it’s so dangerous to release we’re just giving you a sample”. I don’t know how else you could read that quote.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Really? The part saying "experiment: while we are not sure" doesn't strike you as this being "we don't know if this is dangerous or not, so we're playing it safe while we figure this out"? To me this is them figuring out what "general purpose AI testing" even looks like in the first place. And there's quite a lot of people who look at public LLMs today and think their ability to "generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale" means they should not have been released, i.e. that those saying it was too dangerous (even if it was the press rather than the researchers looking at how their models were used in practice) were correct, it's not all one-sided arguments from people who want uncensored models and think that the risks are overblown.
    - trescenzi 2y ago
      Yea that’s fair. I think I was reacting to the strength of your initial statement. Reading that press release and writing a piece stating that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 is too dangerous to release feels reasonable to me. But it is less accurate than saying that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 _might_ be too dangerous to release. And I agree with your basic premise. The dangers imo are significantly more nuanced than most people make them out to be.
rvense 2y ago
"Please please please make AI safety legislation so we won't have real competitors."

Barrin92 2y ago

I talked to a Palantir guy at a conference once and he literally told me "I'm happy when the media hypes us up like a James Bond villain because every time the stock price goes up, in reality we mostly just aggregate and clean up data" This is the psychology of every tech hype cycle

Moru 2y ago
Tech is by no means alone with this trick. Every press release is free adverticement and should be used like it.

ben_w 2y ago

For thousands of years, people believed that men and women had a different number of ribs. Never bothered to count them. """Release strategy Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code . … This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today … """ - https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ It was the news reporting that it was "too dangerous". If anyone at OpenAI used that description publicly, it's not anywhere I've been able to find it.

trescenzi 2y ago
That quote says to me very clearly “we think it’s too dangerous to release” and specifies the reasons why. Then goes on to say “we actually think it’s so dangerous to release we’re just giving you a sample”. I don’t know how else you could read that quote.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 2y ago
  Really? The part saying "experiment: while we are not sure" doesn't strike you as this being "we don't know if this is dangerous or not, so we're playing it safe while we figure this out"? To me this is them figuring out what "general purpose AI testing" even looks like in the first place. And there's quite a lot of people who look at public LLMs today and think their ability to "generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale" means they should not have been released, i.e. that those saying it was too dangerous (even if it was the press rather than the researchers looking at how their models were used in practice) were correct, it's not all one-sided arguments from people who want uncensored models and think that the risks are overblown.
  - trescenzi 2y ago
    Yea that’s fair. I think I was reacting to the strength of your initial statement. Reading that press release and writing a piece stating that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 is too dangerous to release feels reasonable to me. But it is less accurate than saying that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 _might_ be too dangerous to release. And I agree with your basic premise. The dangers imo are significantly more nuanced than most people make them out to be.

rvense 2y ago

"Please please please make AI safety legislation so we won't have real competitors."