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Comment by lalos | Hacker News Reader

> Here's one example: GPT-4 was actually done back in August of last year. If their goal was to maximize profit, the obvious thing to do would be to release API access to it as soon as possible.

They did that, that's how Reid Hoffman got early access to write his book, that's how Microsoft got access to start working on Bing/ChatGPT4 for a cool $10 billion and that's how countless of other got early access. Got the money, got the marketing and got the synchronized deployment of multiple use cases by a selected crew of companies and they get to say the corpspeak of 'we care, we didn't release on August!'. This is taken from the Apple iOS SDK book, you make the API changes and release privately to have the announcement and a parade of implementations by third party to prove that it is viable.

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Besides wasn't releasing GPT3 supposed to have caused major harm to society? Which is why they held off for so long. Still waiting for evidence of that harm (mass fake news, Google being ruined by even more low ranking spam sites, etc).

It must be nice thinking that a small group withholding the keys R&D (for a short while until other R&D groups catch up) will somehow help the problem. Do these few months to a year really provide much value in finding ways to stop the "AI apocalypse"? What real work are they doing to prevent it in those few months? More philosphizing and high level analysis?

It might work for messaging/marketing that they are being "careful" but I'm not convinced this is tangible. Seems as arrogant and naive as most AI ethics stuff I read.

Releasing the biggest version of GPT-2 was supposed to have caused major harm to society.

My memory was that they were worried about GPT-2 if society weren't ready for it. So they've been trying to make people aware of what its capabilities are. I think ChatGPT really did an amazing job of that, as I said. Now everyone knows that computers can write low-quality drivel for pennies a paragraph, and as a society we're starting to adjust to that reality.

Just to be clear you think OpenAI achieved this by holding off releasing it for a short period? And this achieved mainstream penetration? Or among programmers?

IMO stuff like deep fakes didn't become real until people started seeing it IRL. They weren't reading FUDy posts on HN or academic papers. Even the niche tech posts on NYT rarely get more than a few hundred thousand people reading them.

I have no idea what would have happened if they'd just dumped GPT-2, weights and all, into the world when it first came out; or even if they'd just gone straight to a paid API. They didn't know either. I think given that nobody knew, their strategy of "try to warn the technorati, give access slowly and make sure nothing bad happens, then make a widely-accessible interface" seems like a reasonably cautious approach.

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