Comment by minimaxir
1 month ago
Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.
This is a natural follow up question -- what kind of an escalation or message should frontier labs/companies publish to be seen as genuine and not marketing gimmick?
I'd say it's almost impossible at that point. Specifically, Altman said so many lies in the past that people stopped believing anything he says.
I think the core of this distrust is the fact that these companies positioned themselves against humanity from the start by saying people will lose most jobs etc. Not only it didn't happen, but many people feel several aspects of their lives got worse because of LLMs, in spite of obvious advantages. So the distrust and reluctance are real.
It's fine for the labs to publish model safety cards and stagger releases/limit it to a narrow test group as they are already doing, but saying they're doing it "because the models could be dangerous" comes off as unnecessary as best.
One of the main purposes of model cards, from the beginning, has been to outline the ways that a model could be harmful or dangerous, and mitigations that can be or have been taken to reduce those risks. How do you expect labs to publish model cards without talking about this rationale?
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What? So it’s fine for them to be concerned about the safety, try to measure it, publish results about it, start with a cautious phased release approach, basically all the things they’re doing.
But if they say why they’re doing all those things, it’s too much? What?
Unnecessary based on what exactly? Your vibes?
I dont think they can, their rhetoric is so silly these days that if they did accidentally release something dangerous no one would believe them. The Boy who cried Rokos Basilisk I guess.
These chicken littles have lied far too many times in far too extreme ways in their desperate attempts to obtain a monopoly by regulation.
The remaining 'worthwhile message' would be that they have deleted their models and are dissolving the company, because they believe the risk was too great and was worth losing the revenue and risk being civically prosecuted by their investors, and will take the chance that they'll be able to convince a court/jury that they acted properly.
In other words, putting their own skin on the line for the veracity of their claim-- rather than everyone elses.
Such as? Yes, yes, we know OpenAI isn’t as open as you want. What else? What are all these egregious lies that the frontier labs have told you?
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How is this a gimmick?
It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.
We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.
My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day.
My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works.
That was shocking to see.
Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.
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My non-programmer friends have created:
- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.
- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.
Has it been released to the public yet? Genuine question. Because if you didn't try it yourself, you have to rely on others' reports. And different people who tried it on different projects got different results, leading to different conclusions.
it was released a few hrs ago as "Fable 5". it's an incremental improvement over Opus 4.8.
> It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine
I assure, it doesn't.
I'm happy to have a discussion with you if you bring any argument.
Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"
Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.
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It already has!
It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.
And no one is going back.
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For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.
Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hxa3kj/ai_reached...
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It was bullshit in 2019 it's bullshit now too.
They just keep threatening governments in hope they get a legal monopoly.
Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic loves people switching to Codex. Brilliant marketing.