Comment by johnfn
3 months ago
Yeah, I find it a bit odd how at the time everyone was pointing and laughing at OpenAI for being obviously wrong about this. Now in 2026, AI slop is very obviously a serious problem - it inundates all platforms and obscures the truth. And people are still saying OpenAI in 2019 were wrong?
I think people today are more focused on how OpenAI released a model "too dangerous to release", not that they were right or wrong, as part of the general trend of criticizing OpenAI for not following any of its stated principles.
Exactly. The (real) issues were ultimately disregarded even if they were correctly identified.
My assumption is that it was too expensive to actually release at the time. It wasn't good enough for anybody to pay to use it yet, and it surely was very expensive to run, especially for a (fake, granted) non profit.
Both crowds are right because two messages were spread. The researchers spread reasonable fears and concerns. The marketing charlatans like Altman oversold the scare as "Terminator in T-4 days" to imply greater capacity in those systems than was reasonably there.
The problem is the most publicly disseminated messaging around the topic were the fear mongering "it's god in a box" style messaging around it. Can't argue with the billions secured in funding heisted via pyramid scheme for the current GPU bonfire, but people are right to ridicule, while also right to point out warnings were reasonable. Both are true, it depends on which face of "OpenAI" we're talking about, researchers or marketing chuds?
Ultimately AGI isn't something anyone with serious skill/experience in the field expects of a transformer architecture, even if scaled to a planet sized system. It is an architecture which simply lacks the required inductive bias. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar or a charlatan.
Right, there's a lot of that problem going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
I think it's important to consider that OpenAI's qualms weren't with making the dangerous models usable, they were with making the model usable without paying them. They're perfectly fine with any harm, as long as they get money out of it and can't be held liable.
It's the same with the Mythos stuff, I appreciate their concern/work on safety, but if it's "too dangerous", it should be unavailable until it is less dangerous.
It's this crowd having it both ways. The default desire is to dunk on AI, however inconsistent the arguments.