Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
4 hours ago
So I'm supposed to believe that the intent of publicly announcing e.g. the HuggingFace incident was to simultaneously persuade investors that the technology will rocket ahead, and also to persuade governments that it needs to be thwarted?
Why wouldn't it do the reverse? Persuade investors that the technology will be thwarted (and is thus a poor investment), while also persuading the government that the technology needs to rocket ahead with no regulation (to boost the economy)?
Most of these HN conspiracy theories seem like galaxy-brained just-so-stories to me.
OpenAI only confirmed the RubyGems incident when it was discovered by external researchers: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-agents-attac...
"@OpenAI this is the third time you've dumped these incidents late on a Friday. The first time this happened, I asked people around me if it might be intentional to burry it, and they assured me OpenAI had too much integrity to try to do that.
Perhaps one of your researchers can confirm that the unfortunate timing is a coincidence?"
Two birds with one stone.
They would be convincing the government these tools are extremely powerful, the government reads that as a potential weapon. They're also convincing the government its so dangerous the industry needs heavy regulation.
Investors read that as (a) the government would be a huge customer and (b) the government would be regulation in a way that prevents further competition and may deem the companies too big to fail, both making these safer investments rather than riskier ones.
Again, you could just as easily argue that if investors believe the technology is dangerous, it's therefore not ready for prime time and will not see widespread industry adoption, therefore less promising for investment. Also this line of reasoning could easily lead to nationalization, which could certainly harm investors, to say the least.
This "stunt" story is like an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine which requires a bunch of things to go just right. I haven't seen any evidence that stock prices even move in a favorable direction when these announcements come out. If anything, the opposite.
Motte and Bailey.
Motte (easy to defend claim) : asking for regulation might serve both purposes
Bailey (hard to defend claim) : companies are conspiring to make AI look way more powerful than it is and AI is actually not that powerful. They are just trying to hype up the stock valuation of their companies.
> companies are conspiring to make AI look way more powerful than it is
The former explanation may be the more accurate one, but I'd be shocked if the top leaders in these labs aren't doing this at some level. We know that almost all of them are in communication at least occasionally, and their public PR stories align much too quickly to truly be coincidence.
>So I'm supposed to believe that the intent of publicly announcing e.g. the HuggingFace incident was to simultaneously persuade investors that the technology will rocket ahead, and also to persuade governments that it needs to be thwarted?
No, you're not "supposed to believe" anything. I was responding to your point about it being difficult to believe (i.e. requiring mental gymnastics) that companies would try to spin a story differently for investors and the government. They do that all the time.
That's not the claim above.
The claim is that the exact same evidence is (allegedly) deliberately produced in order to portray opposite, mutually incompatible things to different people.
And these are mutually incompatible in the "second order chaos" sense, where the very act of convincing one party actually effectuates the opposite behavior in the other party.
If they "do that all the time," surely you can provide some concrete examples?
If they had the choice (i.e. this is all just a ruse), can you explain why they wouldn't just directly demonstrate that open weight models are unsafe (e.g. by pointing to a market forming for abliterated models) and separately demonstrate that their own models are safe?