Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

My thought about the demise of OAI’s AGI safety team is that they outlived their usefulness.

It was a marketing campaign. “We’re super cool. We’re super advanced. We hope don’t make the terminator! wink wink” “Oh no! GPT-2 is too dangerous! We better not release it! Oh wait. We did. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “)

It was never a serious thing. Sure here and in the depths of weirdo forums people whispered about the AGI that can’t be named — Roko’s Basilisk. It was just comically stupid. Pascal’s Wager with extra steps.

Now OpenAI has tons of money and everyone wants to deal with them, so they don’t need that hype machine. Instead they’re saying stick their “dangerous” models in your toaster Maximum Overdrive style.

It was transparent

> It was a marketing campaign. > it was never a serious thing

Yeppppp. This is what i was saying for weeks and weeks, if not months. The amount of people on Reddit who can not see the puzzle pieces of “OpenAI sells AI” , “AI is hyped” , “more hype = more attention = more money and media coverage” and put them together, is actually shocking. Every time i would point this out on Reddit, more often than not i would get downvoted, and the responses were basically “well actually, AGI is around the corner”

This community is honestly SO MUCH BETTER than a lot of futurist subs. I might just stick to this site for a while.

I find there can be significant cargo culting [0] on HN too when any of these topics hit the front page: OpenAI / ChatGPT / LLMs; Zoom; E2EE; regulation / policy; crypto currency / NFTs [1] etc.

That said, I’m kind of glad to hear that Reddit is worse, as it puts the situation here on HN into some wider perspective (it’s not that bad here).

[0]: meant in the form of: closed minded absolutism without full contextual appreciation or understanding of the domain (what you seem to be describing as happening on Reddit)

[1]: less so these days, I wonder if that has something do with the current AI hype cycle cough opportunistic bandwagon jumping cough o_o

Yeah, Reddit is pretty bad when it comes to trying to have well reasoned discussions with people.

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