Comment by calebkaiser
1 hour ago
I'm typically very skeptical of most content marketing/corporate PR.
In the case of this incident, I struggle to see the clear upshot for OpenAI. It seems pretty unlikely they'd ever okay this intentionally as some sort of marketing.
For one, it'd be pretty damning when it leaked that this was a setup, and it would 100% leak at some point. But more importantly, it really flies in the face of the general argument frontier labs have been putting forth around the dangers of "ungovernable" open models and the role of frontier labs as responsible custodians. Members of OpenAI's leadership team were actually in the middle of a Twitter spat with HuggingFace employees/open model advocates about open models being generally decel and bad when this happened.
HF immediately got to show that they were only able to respond to the incident because of open models, that we can't rely on labs to be our sole source of stewardship, etc as a result of this.
> It seems pretty unlikely they'd ever okay this intentionally as some sort of marketing. > Members of OpenAI's leadership team were actually in the middle of a Twitter spat with HuggingFace employees/open model advocates
The point of these campaigns is to eventually invoke some sort of response from the government, such as banning open models, which OpenAI (and Anthropic) stand to benefit from.
So OpenAI would be proving to the government that they should be trusted to govern models, by failing to govern their models?
Plenty of shady stuff goes on in marketing, and I'm sure that OpenAI is going to opportunistically grab any potential upside from this (and any other situation, generally). But it is hard to imagine that this is part of a premeditated master plan that went something like:
- Advocate that open models are ungovernable and that frontier labs should be trusted to safeguard autonomous agents
- Immediately fail to safeguard their autonomous agent
- Intentionally hack the company who is most publicly critical of their view, and who happens to be the center of the open model universe
- Collaborate with said company on reports that show that open models were in fact critical to mitigating their rogue agent
- So tightly control access to this plan at their 8,000 employee company that it never leaks
All in the hopes of generally getting the attention of the government, who would then hopefully (and inexplicably, given the details here) decide to give OpenAI more power?
There are probably easier ways to lobby politicians.