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Comment by endymion-light | Hacker News Reader

While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!

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This is some serious revisionist history. GPT-2 wasn't instruction-following or even conversational.

Hyperbole.

It's really not. It was a fun toy but had very little utility. It could generate plausible looking text that collapsed immediately upon any amount of inspection or even just attention. Code generation wasn't even a twinkle in Altman's eye scanning orbs at that point.

Talking about revisionist…

But like Mythos, it was too dangerous to release.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...

And the "too dangerous to release" capability was writing somewhat plausible news articles based on a headline or handwritten beginning of an article. In the same style as what you had written

Today we call that "advanced autocomplete", but at the time OpenAI managed to generate a lot of hype about how this would lead to an unstoppable flood of disinformation if they allowed the wrong people access to this dangerous tool. Even the original gpt3 was still behind waitlists with manual approval

And as it turns out, they were correct.

I think you misunderstand the comment you replied to. They are saying the above comment was a rhetorical exaggeration of GPT-2's capabilities as a commentary on how low quality Samsung TV software is. They don't actually think GPT-2 was very capable. It is a figure of speech, not a literal statement.

If so, I apologize.

it's a joke about the quality of samsung tv's rather than a serious comment - i should have said a perceptron could hack a samsung tv

Fair enough, sorry :)

And yet Dario in his OpenAI days was proclaiming it too scary to be released.

Now why does that sound familiar...?

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