alt Hacker NewsGPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)
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It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.
Unfortunately, Anthropic and Claude models have joined the ranks of Mind-killer topics where the signal to noise ratio in any discussion has dropped through the basement.
I've barely changed my mind on it. It was obviously premature at the time, but the right attitude because it's hard to tell which model is too dangerous in advance. If anything, I wish this rigor had evolved with the next releases but alas we no longer have the OpenAI of 2019.
In hindsight, they were entirely correct.
The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.
I believe it was a marketing strategy.
They released it, and look what happened. It WAS too dangerous.
Say hypothetically that they were concerned that GPT models would see widespread abuse, for example by students cheating on homework assignments, in a way that could cause likely-irreversible societal changes some of which are harmful. Can we confidently say they were wrong?
Hilarious. Imagine the same about Claude coming back from 2036.
GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019) (2022)
After people get tired of the "too dangerous to release" punchline, they might come up with "too big to fail". Oh, wait that's already invented in 2008.
> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.
They were not wrong, indeed whole industries are running on this technology maliciously now, because of which RAM, disk prices increased a lot.
- RAM, GPU, Disk prices are up
- Slop became the norm
- people are writing documents with AI, reading with AI, responding with AI
- students are doing homeworks with AI
- interviewees are using AI to cheat
- people are mass emailing with AI
- tiktok, instagram, youtube got even more non-sense videos
- and many more...they knew the risks and went ahead anyways, making them LIABLE for the damages that followed.
Same vibes:
In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes"
"Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance."
[1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...
I don't know about anyone else, but LLMs certainly significantly negatively impacted my life overall and contributed to a loss of hope in the future.
Related in April:
OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)
Seven years of this insufferable brand of "Oh it's so dangerous, I sure hope no one gives us a ton of money and takes us seriously" marketing and people are still falling for it at scale.
The concern I heard was that releasing it would start an arms race for AGI, which I think it clearly did
Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.