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OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)
- JumpCrisscross 7mo agoHad a minor conniption until I saw the year. OpenAI just struggled to close a round. And the New Yorker just published an unflattering profile of Altman [1]. So it would make sense they'd go back to the PR strategy of "stop me from shooting grandma." [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
- 52-6F-62 7mo ago> "stop me from shooting grandma." That is the most succinct manner I've seen this whole thing put.
- sam1r 7mo agoAbsolutely agreed. I am using this term on overdrive the next 24 hours.
- onionisafruit 7mo agoI didn’t notice the year in the headline. My poor meemaw still had a few months of clarity ahead of her, but this headline stole it away from her
- blitzar 7mo agoWe are living in a post-shame world.
- johnfn 7mo agoWow! I totally remember reading the bit I'll quote down below back in 2019 and having my mind utterly blown. What a blast from the past. If anything, I think this moment was even more astounding to me than GPT 3.5, 4, etc. > For example, researchers fed the generator the following scenario: > > In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English. > The GPT-2 algorithm produced a news article in response: > > The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science. Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved. Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain, surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow. Pérez and the others then ventured further into the valley. “By the time we reached the top of one peak, the water looked blue, with some crystals on top,” said Pérez.
- nprateem 7mo agoThose classic 4 horned unicorns...
- buremba 7mo agoIt playbook is that a model is too dangerous until a competitor releases a competing model that beats yours.
- measurablefunc 7mo agoAt which point you tell them they are being extremely reckless but subtly mention that something new & even scarier is being developed internally that's going to blow everything else out of the water.
- linzhangrun 7mo ago[flagged]
- make3 7mo agothe thing could barely make full grammatical sentences, it's funny to see that even then they were overclaiming the fuck out of their myself
- anuramat 7mo agoimho it was more reasonable back then to claim "agi soon" -- back when nobody really knew how it scales
- phire 7mo agoThey weren't claiming it was dangerous because "AGI soon", that didn't come until later. OpenAI were claiming GPT-2 was too dangerous because it could be used to flood the internet with fake content (mostly SEO spam). And they were somewhat right. GPT-2 was very hard to prompt, but with a bit of effort it could spit out endless pages that were good enough to fool a search engine, and even a human at a first glance (you were often several paragraphs in before you realised it was complete nonsense.
- make3 7mo agowe essentially have AGI right now brother
- bdangubic 7mo agowe got the A and G parts, just missing the I part but it’s coming :)
- selcuka 7mo agoIt was a 1.5B parameter model. It was still impressive for 2019, but yeah, it was nothing to worry about.
- make3 7mo ago1.5B and insanely under-trained. Size didn't mean much before the scaling laws papers came out.
- cinkhangin 7mo agoI think they are right unintentionally. The growing amount of low-quality content everywhere could become a real problem.
- ajsnigrutin 7mo agoNow imagine all that low quality AI slop is being posted online and a new generation of AI will "learn" from it, output it's own version of AI slop, that will eventually end up online again for a new generation of AI to "learn" from. Something, something, idiocracy comes to mind.
- Nevermark 7mo ago> Something, something, idiocracy comes to mind. So, confirmation? They are catching up quickly! The actuality is, anyone with pre-slop data still has their pre-slop data. And there are endless ways to get more value out of good data. Bootstrapping better performance by using existing models to down select data for higher density/median quality, or leverage recognizable lower quality data to reinforce doing better. Models critiquing each other, so the baseline AI behavior increases, and in the process, they also create better training data. And a thousand more ways. Managed intelligently, intelligence wants to compound. The difference between human and AI idiocracy, is we don't delete our idiots. I am not suggesting we do that. But maybe we shouldn't elect them. Either way, that is one more very steep disadvantage for us.
- livinglist 7mo agoThe AI centipede
- bitwize 7mo agoThis leads to a well-documented phenomenon known as model collapse. You know how if you blur and sharpen an image repeatedly you eventually end up with just a rectangle of creepy, wormy spaghetti lines? You lose information on each blur, and then ask it to reconstitute the image with less information on each sharpen, until there's nothing recognizable left. Training a model is like the blur and generating from that model is like the sharpen. Repeat enough times and enough information is lost that you're just left with "wormy spaghetti lines"—in an LLM's case, meaningless gibberish that actually pretty closely resembles the glitchy stuff said by the cores that fall off GLaDOS in Portal. I dunno, you read the paper and be the judge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y To jump to the last output sample, C-f Gen 9 Of course you may be talking about the human aspect of this. Gods willing, we'll realize that our LLMs are spewing gibberish and think twice about putting them in all the things, all the time. But the scenario I fear isn't Idiocracy—it's worse: a community of humans who treat the gibberish as sacred writ, Zardoz style.
- villgax 7mo agoVery safe to use the outputs to make a better model coz scraping the internet for publicly accessible content means your publicly shared outputs only become part of the same lol
- measurablefunc 7mo agoI'm wondering when people are going to figure out the doom marketing playbook.
- salad-tycoon 7mo agoWe know it, we’re just susceptible to it. Like not eating for an extended time, you know you’ll get hungry and then you do. There’s a very basic but powerful response to danger and a need for safety.
- JackYoustra 7mo agoAI systems far weaker than GPT-2 have had terrible effects. The result of how information and power is distributed mostly flows along the lines of reward hacking recommendation engines, powered by even weaker models. And yet, somehow, it is beyond disagreeable but unbelievable that other people may have and may still reasonably believe that these things are too dangerous for widespread release?
- 34tzaer 7mo ago[dead]
- romanzubenko 7mo agoI remember seeing this article and example output text and feeling what's the big deal? It wasn't until I got early access to GPT-3, that I though like something big is about to happen. At the time only a few companies/yc alums had access and I remember showing playground to people outside of tech, and my friend just kept asking "How does it know about my [x] domain? It it a trick?".
- strangescript 7mo agoTheir concerns weren't completely off base, I think they just over estimated how much it would really matter in the grand scheme.
- SecretDreams 7mo agoYes, there was sadly a mismatch between the morality they thought existed vs what actually existed :(. Also, probably vastly underestimated global apathy.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoWe got extremely, extremely lucky that society is as resilient as it's proven to be against fake news. I don't think very many people predicted that it simply wouldn't matter when photorealistic compromising images of whoever you don't like became available for $5.
- acuozzo 7mo ago> I don't think very many people predicted that it simply wouldn't matter when photorealistic compromising images of whoever you don't like This goes hand-in-hand with the widespread death of belief in absolute truth in the US and other western nations. If this technology were released during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I'd wager it would have had the impact most of us expected it to have, at least for a little while.
- blitzar 7mo agoDelusions of grandeur is often seen in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or narcissistic personality disorder.
- guessbest 7mo agoFeels like from the before times.
- _jdtm 7mo ago[dead]
- Sunspark 7mo agoThe current "too dangerous" hype today is Anthropic's Mythos. They say it is so mighty that they will wall it off and only grant access to approved corporations.
- ModernMech 7mo agoAh yes, corporations, famously the right hands to wield mighty weapons.
- moi2388 7mo agoI would also say my tech is too dangerous and only allowed for selected corporations if I tried to sell my tech to said corporations.
- subroutine 7mo agoThey finally did release 2.0 under the MIT license. That was the last version (a 1.5-billion-parameter model) they would release open source. GPT3 for comparison has 175 billion parameters.
- renewiltord 7mo agoNo. That’s not true. https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b Was released after.
- Zetaphor 7mo agoFor clarity here, "after" was 6 years later, once Meta and then the Chinese labs had already established the ecosystem
- subroutine 7mo agoI'm confused. From what I can tell GPT-2 was released in 2019... https://huggingface.co/openai-community/gpt2 https://huggingface.co/openai-community/gpt2 https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/model_card.md https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/model_card.md
- renewiltord 7mo agoIt was not the last version they released open source. GPT-OSS-120B was released open source after it.
- subroutine 7mo agoOh duh, you are absolutely right. I thought you were saying they never released GPT-2.
- selfhoster11 7mo ago[dead]
- bertmuthalaly 7mo agoNow that I see this in the light of the recent sama article, I wonder whether the point of the "it's too dangerous" rhetoric is to enable "Open" AI to avoid open-sourcing the weights and process. A convenient pretext for maintaining a monetizable competitive advantage while claiming a benevolent purpose.
- vaginaphobic 7mo ago[dead]
- Zetaphor 7mo agoThey don't need an excuse to not open the model weights (unfortunately). As far as I know the only western lab to release weights of a former flagship model is xAI with Grok 2. They said they were going to do the same for Grok 3 but nothing so far. They have no obligation to do any open releases, it's just good PR for recruitment, fundraising, and devrel
- nsmog767 7mo agoZero mention of Sam Altman…interesting
- ramoz 7mo agoI fine tuned GPT-2 on the FAR (federal acquisition regulation) and demoed it to a CFO at a 3-letter. This was shortly after the release when we were building a templating system to automate RFP and RFI creation. I proclaimed that the customer soon wouldn't have to write any of the mad lip parts themselves, and they can use AI to do it. It sounded great until I demoed and the model went off the rails with some rhetoric entangling "Trump", "Russia", "China", "CIA", "Voting" -- the demo was for a janitorial procurement at the agency.
- october8140 7mo ago"You don't want no part of this" | Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story https://youtu.be/CepW8wAuL_M https://youtu.be/CepW8wAuL_M
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI'm somewhere between frustrated and baffled why people raise this as an example of overselling. This was clearly a reasonable call! Not all the experts quoted in the source article agree that the model should have been held back, but they all agreed that the risks were real and it's understandable why OpenAI would do it.
- SilverSlash 7mo agoSomeone needs to make a compilation of all these classic OpenAI moments. Including hits like GPT-2 too dangerous, the 64x64 image model DALL-E too scary, "push the veil of ignorance back", AGI achieved internally, Q*/strawberry is able to solve math and is making OpenAI researchers panic, etc. etc. I use Codex btw, and I really love it. But some of these companies have been so overhyping the capabilities of these models for years now that it's both funny to look back and tiresome to still keep hearing it. Meanwhile I am at wits end after NONE OF Codex GPT-5.4 on Extra High, Claude Opus 4.6-1M on Max, Opus 4.6 on Max, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on High have been able to solve a very straightforward and basic UI bug I'm facing. To the point where, after wasting a day on this, I am now just going to go through the (single file) of code and just fix it myself. Update: some 20 minutes later, I have fixed the bug. Despite not knowing this particular programming language or framework.
- DougMerritt 7mo ago> I am now just going to go through the (single file) of code and just fix it myself. That's front page news, in this era.
- abnercoimbre 7mo agoThank you for the belly laugh.
- SilverSlash 7mo agoI understand how laughable that sounds when I say it out loud. But the reality is, when I'm in a state of 'Tell LLM what to do, verify, repeat', it's really hard to sometimes break out of that loop and do manual fixes. Maybe the brain has some advanced optimization where once you're in a loop, roughly staying inside that loop has a lower impedance than starting one. Maybe that's why the flow state feels so magical, it's when resistance is at its lowest. Maybe I need sleep.
- Traubenfuchs 7mo ago> Maybe the brain …is already damaged by reliance on AI.
- apical_dendrite 7mo agoI have a lot of trouble understanding the mindset of a person who thinks that what they're building is so dangerous that it must be locked away or it will cause untold harm, but also that they must build it as fast as possible. I can understand it in the context of the Manhattan project, where you're fighting a war for survival. I cannot understand how you can do it as a commercial enterprise.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- adi_kurian 7mo agoAn important distinction that might not be understood from scanning the headline is that "too dangerous to release" is more specifically stated as "too dangerous to open-source the full model weights", which they ended up doing anyway. Not equivalent to Anthropic Mythos.
- ben_yuan 7mo ago[flagged]
- cat5e 7mo agoIs anyone keeping a history of this AI "summer"? I'm sure the timeline would be very amusing.
- Anamon 7mo agoI keep hoping for a "GenAI is going great", but I'm also too lazy to start one myself.
- PaulShomo 7mo agoWhat a blast from the past. You have to take yourself back in the ol' time-machine to remember that 2019 mindset. People were probably still reeling from a few years prior when the Microsoft Tay bot made news for soiling twitter with naughty tweets.
- an0malous 7mo agoAll the good stuff gets posted after the Americans go to sleep
- an0malous 7mo agoOP posted too early, they flagged it off the front page
- jjcm 7mo agoThis is obviously in response to Mythos, but I'll actually defend their statement at that time - they were right to take a pause. Think about how much things have changed in our industry since GPT-2 has dropped - it WAS that dangerous, not in itself, but because it was the first that really signaled a change in the field of play. GPT-2 was where the capabilities of these were really proven, up until that point it was a neat research project. Mythos is similar. It's showing things we haven't seen before. I read the full 250 page whitepaper today (joys of being pseudo-retired, had the hours to do it), and I was blown away. It's capabilities for hacking are unparalleled, but more importantly they've shown that they've made significant improvements in safety for this model just in the last month, and taking more time to make sure it doesn't negatively affect society is a net positive.
- QuantumFunnel 7mo ago[flagged]
- loremium 7mo agoGates Law
- smetannik 7mo agoThis didn't age well
- jcstryker 7mo agoThis marketing strategy is getting tiring, every model is more dangerous than the next... Playing on fear instead of the bright future you are opening up for us all is not the feeling I would want to leave the public with
- yaroslavvb 7mo agoThis was around the time I trained Transformer-XL (outside of OpenAI) with Ben Mann (https://yaroslavvb.medium.com/scaling-transformer-xl-to-128-gpus-d21875961c5d https://yaroslavvb.medium.com/scaling-transformer-xl-to-128-...) . Originally we wanted to release train and release the weights as a kind of GPT-2.5, but our OpenAI friends pushed us to keep weights closed.
- adt 7mo agoSame story with Connor Leahy and his GPT-2 clone, though his public articulation of how OpenAI sat him down seems to be glossed over. " OpenAI reached out to me almost immediately to talk and they were nothing but respectful and understanding... After making it publicly known what I had done, I was quickly approached by a range of smart people with good arguments. Many of them helped me update my beliefs in light of new evidence... The day after my announcement, I got to talk to Jack Clark, Alec Radford and Jeff Wu from OpenAI. We had a nice hour long discussion, where I explained where I was coming from, and they helped me to refine my beliefs. They didn’t come in accusing me in any way, they were very clear in saying they wanted to help me gain more important insight into the wider situation. For this open and respectful attitude I will always be grateful. Large entities like OpenAI often seem like behemoths to outsiders, but it was during this chat that it really hit me that they were people just like me, and curious hackers to boot as well. I quickly began to understand nuances of the situation I wasn’t aware of. OpenAI had a lot more internal discussion than their blog post made it seem. And I found this reassuring. Jack in particular also gave me a lot of valuable information about the possible dangers of the model, and a bit of insight into the workings of governments and intelligence agencies. After our discussion, I had a lot to think about. But I still wasn’t really convinced to not release. Even some people inside OpenAI were still discussing the not-release policy. So while I definitely had things to consider, I was still mostly set on releasing... We shouldn’t be angry with OpenAI for what they did. We should applaud them for making a point before it becomes a true problem. Prophylaxis is much better than treatment. I still disagree with some of the things OpenAI did and how they communicated them, but I now understand that sending a message that it is ok, even celebrated, for a lone individual to unilaterally go against reasonable safety concerns of other researchers is not a good message to send. I want to support OpenAI’s message. So, while it might be a small, mostly symbolic gesture, I will not be releasing my model. Some day, someone like me may be in a situation just like mine, but it won’t be GPT2. It might be something much, much more dangerous. And that is the person I am trying to talk to here. " https://medium.com/@NPCollapse/the-hacker-learns-to-trust-62f3c1490f51 https://medium.com/@NPCollapse/the-hacker-learns-to-trust-62... https://archive.md/1HoGz https://archive.md/1HoGz
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoTheads now of "Doctorow vs Zuboff", perhaps the two biggest critics of tech today, but Doctorow noting how Zuboff's criticism is really a radical super over amplification of ad-tech/big-tech's pitch, heightened to the point of being much scarier than the initial pitch. More than accepting the pitch, radically over accentuating the effectiveness of the ad-tech proposition! Yes ad-tech totally completely understands you! In vastly deep ways! How horrifying right? No, please don't keep signing up for your business to succeed by tapping this incredible keep infinitely detailed knowledge-bank of humanity that can predict everything! Don't give them money to make your business wildly successful beyond dream for their incredible insight! That would be so bad if their amazing tech let you exploit the population to amazingly target delivery of what you are selling! How horrible how effective it is!! https://www.cigionline.org/articles/doctorow-versus-zuboff/ https://www.cigionline.org/articles/doctorow-versus-zuboff/ https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/cory_doctorow_o_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/cory_doctorow... This is happening so so strongly. All the time. But today especially. Mythos is a cult forming social technology much more than it is a technical technology. I'm going to be pretty wrong on that cynicism, I know! But also, it portrays a reality of what is happening. Mythos is being built as a Devs like diety with rule and domonion and awe. It drinks the nectar forbidden to man. We may not even sample this realm's tastes, nay! It would be ruin!! The idea that this preciariat-launch to some trusted security firms is going to do jack all to actually build a base against what comes next is a joke. Maybe there is something to it, but my strong expectation is that the beneficiaries are not softwares of the world, not open source in any form, but some narrow closed far off present-day losers who have broadly bad bad bad systems that are just too big to embarrass. Too big too shame. But more so, that this model gains a cascade of levels of notoriety by being Zuboff style too good to release. Thus begins the new age. Hardware is now broadly post consumer, too expensive to buy. Mythos means nothing, is nothing. It's just the Zuboff excuse to roll the ladder up further, the reason to move from GPT-5.4 Pro prices of $270/1m tokens output to $2700+++/1m tokens. Mythos is the Zuboffian campaign to train us for the next 10x price increase. To tell us everything we have done is shit. And given its costs to run: that's still going to be nowhere near enough!
- wodenokoto 7mo agoDid the world ever get access to any of these too dangerous models?
- fancythat 7mo agoAs the old saying goes (I made this up), if it was worth that much, it wouldn't be released to the public. There is absolutely zero chance that something "dangerous" would be available for 20 USD / month to basically anyone in the world. To this day, I am still puzzled when some professionals don't apply the basic logic to certain bombastic events.