alt Hacker NewsRemember when GPT-2 was “too dangerous to release” in 2019? That could have still been the state in 2026 if they didn’t YOLO it and ship ChatGPT to kick off this whole race.
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They didn't YOLO ChatGPT. There were more than a few iterations of GPT-3 over a few years which were actually overmoderated, then they released a research preview named ChatGPT (that was barely functional compared to modern standards) that got traction outside the tech community because it was free, and so the pivot ensued.
I also remember when the playstation 2 required an export control license because it's 1GFLOP of compute was considered dangerous
that was also brilliant marketing
In 2019 the technology was new and there was no 'counter' at that time. The average persons was not thinking about the presence and prevalence of ai in the way we do now.
It was kinda like a having muskets against indigenous tribes in the 14-1500s vs a machine gun against a modern city today. The machine gun is objectively better but has not kept up pace with the increase in defensive capability of a modern city with a modern police force.
That's rewriting history. What they said at the time:
> Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter : “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. -- https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
Then over the next few months they released increasingly large models, with the full model public in November 2019 https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-1-5b-release/ , well before ChatGPT.
Yeah, and Jurassic Park wouldn't have been a movie if they decided against breeding the dinosaurs.
I was just thinking earlier today how in an alternate universe, probably not too far removed from our own, Google has a monopoly on transformers and we are all stuck with a single GPT-3.5 level model, and Google has a GPT-4o model behind the scenes that it is terrified to release (but using heavily internally).