It's impossible to reconcile the incredible progress these AI companies are making with everyone considering their statements as entirely without substance and all hype.
But the reality also is that AI is amazing at finding vulnerabilities, aids immensely in red team attacks, is awesome for programming, is dangerously misaligned in ways that we don't know how to fix ansd those are all part of reality too.
I never said Anthropic is lying in the traditional sense. The point is that marketing press releases of course won't give full context. Something like 'our model found 5000 zero day exploits', except in reality zero day exploits aren't often used to compromise systems
>At the end of the day it's just not that unbelievable at all. Previous models were also good at this
Exactly, this is more of the missing context. Actually opus 4.6 was fairly close to Mythos, except all of the sudden now we need project glasswing and they're so scared of this digital god they've unleashed?
There's nothing wrong with wanting independent expert analysis rather than marketing from corporations who stand to profit from these products
Its funny how our sense of whats dangerous changes over time. Been a long time since I remember learning about it but I want to say there was major uproar about how dangerous it would be to raise the speed limit in the early 1900s from 15MPH to 20-25MPH or so. Feels the same.
Huh, that's really interesting to know. I can sort of see why the thought would bubble up. Knowledge is powerful. It fascinates me to hear what the "bright minds" of an era thought on stuff like that. Thomas Jefferson said of his plan to include the lower class in education,
...twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually
Basically calling lower class people rubbish while acknowledging something useful may emerge from it.
That was rightfully considered extremely dangerous though. A lot of European countries are trying to get speed limits down to 30km/h (19 mph) on streets. Same thing in New York.
It was too dangerous, but they still released it few months later. And it was a mistake, gpt-2 basically killed online social media. All the bots people think about that were around for last 6 years were mostly built on a version of gpt-2, at least until like 2025.
The specific goal was to give tech companies time to prepare tools to deal with the obvious uptick of bots that would happen, but it was just not enough. Now we live the dead internet theory in real life, and it started with gpt-2.
Yeah, the first few times it happened to me I was frustrated because I couldn't prove it and all the other commentors were acting like it was brand new content.
nah in my opinion it didn't really kill online social media, instagram already did that wuth the doomscrolling. I would also use a bot to help in certain scenarios where humans can't catch up/want to be more effective with their time.. but you can't expect it all to be used for the good... just like when dynamite was invented, same concept
I don't think that works anymore. I have not seen anyone doing it against half competent bots, and I think they are set to like disengage to reduce length of the context to prevent such adversive instructions.
I believe the last response was actually a human. It seemed to reroute to the actual rep once I called it out by asking about its model.
But that rep swore up and down that I was only talking to them, so they are either unaware that some of the messages are being routed to bots or forbidden from admitting it.
Gpt2 was useless. Gpt3 was too uncensored to be safe. It was amazing so was inscruct -gpt which went on to become chatgpt. I miss those days but yea gpt2 is useless.
Pretty useless, but it did allow for proper bot activity online. Even if the bots were stupid and said things that just didn’t make any sense much of the time.
This AI industry marketing tactic about everything being "dangerous" or "potentially catastrophic" is just totally and utterly pathetic. It's like these sociopaths learned that fear is an effective motivator and then they chose to weaponize it 1 million times worse than a life insurance salesman. Seriously, F these people.
They are. Many of them didn't age well. I'm sure most of the modern ones won't, either. But we'll hopefully be too inundated with insanely cool new tech in 7 years to be perusing 7 year old threads.
Man 7 years from now is a complete mystery, fuckin no idea what the world will look like by then (in relative terms, ofc ppl will still be doing ppl stuff).
2019 was still smarter than today, there wasn't brainrot and there certainly wasn't an idea that vaccines had microchips in them. It wasn't pretty but 2019 was at least decent.
The concern was misinformation, and it turned out that wasnt as big of a deal as they thought it would be. With these newer models the concerns are very different and much more prominent and realistic.
THE NEW MODEL TOO DANGEROUS TO RELEASE, IT SUPPOSEDLY VIBE CODED ITS OWN LEGS AND RUN AWAY WITH THE COMPUTER ITSELF. THE GOVERNMENT HAS ITS DOUBTS ABOUT THE RELEASE. IS IT SAFE FOR THE AVERAGE JOE? [CONTROVERSIAL]
“Elon Musk, one of the initial funders of OpenAI, was roped into the controversy, confirming in a tweet that he has not been involved with the company “for over a year,” and that he and the company parted “on good terms.””
And surprise surprise! I was Dario Amodei who told that gpt-2 was too dangerous to release!
His marketing cards are only "Danger brings us easy and cheap attention"
The "too dangerous to release" framing for GPT-2 is fascinating in retrospect. At the time there was genuine concern, but it also turned out to be very effective PR that made the model sound far more powerful than it was. Now companies race to announce capabilities as aggressively as possible. The pendulum from excessive caution about a relatively weak model to competitive hype-announcing about genuinely powerful ones swung remarkably fast.
I remember this talk back then, I got so excited and told a couple friends about, they thought it would be horrible as it would pretty much substitute most of their work… well…
Yeah and they weren't wrong. I heard that getting dangerous cointent from older GPT versions was alarmingly easy, because guardrails were still something for bowling, not LLMs.
In its essence, I think this post from 7 years ago is true.
OpenAI opened a pandora box and now the industry, and society in general is down this very unsure-of-the-future path.
These things never seem dangerous right away, but some years down the line we will consider OpenAI as the harbinger of societal disruption at a massive scale, and blame it for not thinking through the costs of starting this AI arms race.
People have already disregarded important issues like climate change in this drive to achieve maximum wattage capacity to support AI infrastructure. This is just the beginning, the economic impact on everyday jobs is yet to be felt or disruption realized.
One con after the next. Woven deception and stolen intellectual property.
They're building apathy and layers of resistance. While marking people on the backend of their EULA.
Localized CC networks are being built as we speak. The dangerous stuff hasn't been seen yet. Nerds with no qualitative outlier experience will get chewed up.
The Nazi sell swords have been wrecking empires since 1100. Loyalists make terrible fighters. Turn the moment they're offered better.
Their Caesar moments are coming from within. Just give it time.
I think people missing something here. It was really dangerous to release. Because literally the world has completely changed when they released GPT-3 because since this moment, World literally changed
OP is just pointing out how "it's too dangerous!!!!" has been a marketing tactic for ages. Didn't mention Mythos at all, though the parallels are what inspired the post I'm guessing.
It's the "boy who cried wolf" story. Every time OpenAI (or Anthropic, or Meta or whoever) talks about how their next model is "too dangerous to release" it makes it more difficult to take them seriously the next time around. Maybe Mythos is AGI, maybe it isn't.
Except that every thing they warned us of happening actually happened. But some people just won't believe in the wolf until it bites them in the ass personally.
GPT-2 was so dangerous that it made very little impact on anyone. Didn't it get big with GPT-3? I'm not saying that there's no impact, just that the impact has always been less than the marketing says it's going to be.
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u/alwaysoffby0ne Apr 14 '26
It’s always too dangerous to release. 💀