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Comment by sgillen | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a marketing move to me, claim your model is so powerful that it’s dangerous, and people will be more interested in using it.

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Coincidentally, governments should prevent anyone from building an open source competitor, which would be too dangerous to be out in the wild.

Missile guidance PS2, remember that one? It's an old trick but media still fall for it.

Military grade... encryption

Government can try what it wants, we've done this before

Does your model of the world have anyone who genuinely believes that these things will someday develop levels of expertise in weapons (bio, cyber, or other) which, in the hands of terrorists or other malefactors, would be a real danger?

My model of the world does not recognize the possibility of a model that is simultaneously capable of designing new useful molecules while also not being able to create harmful ones.

Same schtick since at least gpt2

Every time I read one of these from OpenAI I'm strongly reminded of Men Who Stare At Goats

> feels like a marketing move to me

It's a fundraising move. OpenAI becomes concerned about how dangerous the things it's selling are when it comes time to fundraise. This nonsense doesn't work that well in America anymore, in part because our politicians bite the bait and then start regulating, which Altmen et al don't want, but you can absolutely get a term sheet in the Middle East and Asia by linking yourself to the national security budget.

No, prescient people were aware of these risks a long time ago, before any OpenAI company:

In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that human inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe.

Altman, 2015: https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Bostrom 2014: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20527133-superintelligen...

Stephen Hawking, 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

Take your pick.

Are Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Douglas Hofstadter also marketing?

Yes, they absolutely are! If this thing they are working on (or prognosticating about) is world endingly dangerous, it increases their importance.

The same sneaky ploy used to restrict nuclear weapons to a mere handful of "great powers". Even today, most people believe that nuclear weapons are dangerous.

Unfortunately we have tried the destruction power of nuclear weapons on muck up cities and actual cities. This bold claim is not in agreement with experiment.

The danger of nuclear is not the explosion, that's nothing special, really.

Maybe you can't have such a big explosion with conventional weapons but you can just use more.

The problem is contamination.

Invisible and deadly

> danger of nuclear is not the explosion, that's nothing special, really

It's absolutely the explosion. (And fires.) You can make a similar boom as historical (not modern) nukes with conventional weapons, but not in a form factor that fits on the tip of an ICBM.

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