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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Any one noticed how Sam sometimes intentionally tries to attack his own work? For example, he has said GPT-2 was very bad, GPT-3 was bad, and GPT-4 is okay. He also fed the AI doomers by talking about AGI dangers and how the world needs to watch out for a future AI catastrophe. He just gives off the vibe of someone trying to act humble but I don't know how much of it is just an act and how much is real.

I've never seen any CEO just straight out diss their own products.

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it's an attempt to keep the hype train going by implying they have internal models that make GPT-4 look bad. The question is if that's actually true, we'll find out soon because plenty of other companies are now approaching GPT-4 level performance and OpenAI will have to show their hand

Completely agree. I am shocked that this isn't apparent to everyone.

I am frustrated at the pure-hype tone this week took on. There are otherwise intelligent people with strong beliefs that OpenAI "has AGI". It's _ludicrous_ and embarrassing. There are people generating entire philosophies predicated on OpenAI just quietly sitting on a profound technological leap.

Even their missteps are explained as actually good. We've seen some regressions on gpt-4o performance. But that's OK, because it isn't supposed to be smarter, because of its very aggressive claims about future features, but they can distract with fearhype, never release or nerf them, and cite unverifiable safety concerns.

Google released some impressive, useful things this week. I really want to believe that oai's striking claims of simultaneous generation-leaping features, reduced cost, and wide scale will come to pass. But if that tech demo was the equivalent of a concept car that will never really see production, I'm looking for a new AI hero.

> Any one noticed how Sam sometimes intentionally tries to attack his own work? For example, he has said GPT-2 was very bad, GPT-3 was bad, and GPT-4 is okay. He also fed the AI doomers by talking about AGI dangers and how the world needs to watch out for a future AI catastrophe.

That is the opposite of criticism. It all translates to "GPT-(n+1) is going to be super awesome".

To keep the value of the company increasing and make goverment think that AI should be closed source and controlled by some limited entity for maximum profit.

Bill Gates the day of any OS release.

He was good at always saying the current version selling is the best, never a future version.

And for windows 3 and windows 95, he definitely called the old versions trash.

In comparison, they were.

Sam, like Bill only calls them trash after. But also, I hate looking at my old code too.

Even the old code where I thought I was clever looks bad after time. Actually, the clever code looks much worse.

he isn't dissing his own products - his products are safe and ethical. it's the pesky competitors who need to be regulated out of existence.

By saying they have a 10x better product in the pipeline

He’s doing the Elon Musk “I’m not like the other tech CEOs” thing. It’s proven to be very effective in the social media age. It doesn’t matter how much he seems to be dissing his own work when the capabilities speak for themselves.

Nowadays I almost feel like Godwin's law needs an Elon Musk spinoff.

It’s not very odd to mention the world’s most famous tech CEO when talking about tech CEOs.

Wasnt Elon one of founders of OpenAI and was able bring some of the key people there?

Steve Jobs and Elon Musk called out their bad products, and notoriously berate employees for failures and producing what they view as substandard work. I however don’t put Sam in the same ballpark as Steve and Elon… At least yet.

Give him a little further to fall, I'm confident he'll get there.

He is and was head of a non-profit research organization. They now have a very successful for-profit subsidiary, but that takes time to trickle down into differences in what you say.

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