Comment by km144
4 hours ago
The time between public announcement -> public release seems to be a tacit admission that Google is still a bit behind the frontier labs. Google is justifying the delay by pointing to cyber risk and a closed-access period reserved for analysis of safeguards. I'm dubious of this justification. But if it is true, I'm pretty sure the other labs are doing similar sorts of things in private. I think most of us prefer it that way—if Anthropic public announced Fable 5.5 two weeks ago with no availability that would add to my annoyance. Maybe they learned their lesson with Mythos, or maybe it's just that Google also does not have an IPO looming. Who knows?
It's performative stuff to try and appear like they care about alignment and safety.
"Hey we are launching this thing but we've got to let the safety folks see it first".
So they look like they care about alignment etc.
To be honest there is a lot of rage on here about it being announced before being able to access it. I don't understand why people are getting so upset about this - like no one gets into a rage because they see a movie trailer before it is released?
I guess it's also because the model is available to at least one group, and this releases embargo on information about it.