Comment by liliumregale
16 hours ago
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of 'the cat is out of the bag', although I also think the OP misunderstands it, too.
The saying means that you can't un-tell a secret... once a secret is known to the public, you can't make it a secret again.
I think the more appropriate saying would be a similar, but slightly different, one: "That ship has already sailed"
That one is more about "it is too late to do anything about this" and less about information.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
No, doesn't mean that either.
People would sell piglets and would try to sell "a pig in a poke" (where a poke is a bag).
That's why you don't buy a pig in a poke because you can't see what you're buying.
Letting the cat out of the bag is because you've revealed that it was a cat rather than a piglet. You've revealed the deception.
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
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With open models and the work happening outside of Anthropic and OpenAI, the cat is most definitely out of the bag.
> it ends if we decide not to keep telling it
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?