GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019) | Hacker News Reader

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

naokishibuya.github.io

286 pointsAbuAssar131 comments

Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.

How is this a gimmick?

It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.

My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day.

My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works.

That was shocking to see.

Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.

You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.

You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

I was working in a company before which used md5 in 2015! Databases on the internet with a 5 character password. No tests.

A person i know would have broken the whole production DB if i wouldn't have stoped the PR.

Another ex-collegue thought its okay to 'encrypt' with a basic shift cyper creditcard data.

I don't think any of these companies care that much

Yes the same applies to junior and inexperienced developers.

> You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

Indeed. Is Mythos going to change this?

Yes. It is going to make better decisions for people that don't know better.

On one side, it means that a certain amount of business will just use it even if you think its not safe/good enough and they will throw out people and will still succeed.

And on the other side: yes because they will also use LLM review or other tooling and will be fine whatever the 'security llm agent' tells them.

You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

I'd say creating a project is 5% of the job and maintaining it over time 95% of it.

It's true that they can start amazing projects without guidance but then the real work begins.

There is almost no maintenance work for bespoke apps apart from infrequent updates to keep OS and hardware compatibility as the environment slowly changes.

Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by scrum.

I've worked on an app and I'd say the opposite, I even abandonned the app at some point due to the maintenance work involved.

I don't particularly doubt your experience. But if you have struggled to maintain an app that is effectively complete upon inception, it means that changes in your environment are so common that it's a surprise you get anything at all done.

Welcome to the world of apps, apps fits this definition yes.

Thats what the agentic layer will fix, but this is currently getting build.

My non-programmer friends have created:

- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.

- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.

For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.

Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hxa3kj/ai_reached...

I don't think my comment adds anything useful to this thread but thanks for sharing this, I was having a rough week and this made me burst out laughing

I am not clicking that link. I have blocked all reddit domains in my router, using AI to retrieve answers from Reddit.

You can copy paste it in reply if you want

Sure.

The quote from Gemini is: "one reddit user says kill yourself"

> It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine

I assure, it doesn't.

It already has!

It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.

And no one is going back.

My experience is different. I hear a lot of developers, old and young, scaling back their LLM use now that the bills are coming in. And I don't just mean the financial bills, mostly it's about them realising that there's a lot lf shit they need to fix that the model can't handle, and they no longer understand it enough to either do it or properly prompt a model to.

The most prevalent trend I see around me today is that people are going back to using the LLMs as research, review, and sketching tools, but writing most actual code themselves again. And it's not just AI skeptics doing that, it's those who went all-in and are finally seeing the downsides and limitations of this technology, now that the hype is waning.

I'm happy to have a discussion with you if you bring any argument.

Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"

Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.

If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.

The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.

Fine for the initial phase were you have to define the architecture and guardrails etc.

But doesn't matter anymore if you just add things.

Has it been released to the public yet? Genuine question. Because if you didn't try it yourself, you have to rely on others' reports. And different people who tried it on different projects got different results, leading to different conclusions.

it was released a few hrs ago as "Fable 5". it's an incremental improvement over Opus 4.8.

This is a natural follow up question -- what kind of an escalation or message should frontier labs/companies publish to be seen as genuine and not marketing gimmick?

It's fine for the labs to publish model safety cards and stagger releases/limit it to a narrow test group as they are already doing, but saying they're doing it "because the models could be dangerous" comes off as unnecessary as best.

Unnecessary based on what exactly? Your vibes?

One of the main purposes of model cards, from the beginning, has been to outline the ways that a model could be harmful or dangerous, and mitigations that can be or have been taken to reduce those risks. How do you expect labs to publish model cards without talking about this rationale?

I think the point is that the model card should be released with the model, not foreshadowed by several months of ominous tweets from the CEO.

What? So it’s fine for them to be concerned about the safety, try to measure it, publish results about it, start with a cautious phased release approach, basically all the things they’re doing.

But if they say why they’re doing all those things, it’s too much? What?

These chicken littles have lied far too many times in far too extreme ways in their desperate attempts to obtain a monopoly by regulation.

The remaining 'worthwhile message' would be that they have deleted their models and are dissolving the company, because they believe the risk was too great and was worth losing the revenue and risk being civically prosecuted by their investors, and will take the chance that they'll be able to convince a court/jury that they acted properly.

In other words, putting their own skin on the line for the veracity of their claim-- rather than everyone elses.

Such as? Yes, yes, we know OpenAI isn’t as open as you want. What else? What are all these egregious lies that the frontier labs have told you?

Well, you can start with this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/11/musk-v-opena...

So the people who tried to kick him out of the company now have a bunch of vague statements like there being "a pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor". No other details. What a crushing indictment.

I dont think they can, their rhetoric is so silly these days that if they did accidentally release something dangerous no one would believe them. The Boy who cried Rokos Basilisk I guess.

I'd say it's almost impossible at that point. Specifically, Altman said so many lies in the past that people stopped believing anything he says.

I think the core of this distrust is the fact that these companies positioned themselves against humanity from the start by saying people will lose most jobs etc. Not only it didn't happen, but many people feel several aspects of their lives got worse because of LLMs, in spite of obvious advantages. So the distrust and reluctance are real.

Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic loves people switching to Codex. Brilliant marketing.

It was bullshit in 2019 it's bullshit now too.

They just keep threatening governments in hope they get a legal monopoly.

It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

The agentic loop wasn't really established back then either, as tool calling came much much later... So yeah, not just probably - rather most definitely.

Even if the ReAct paper was published in 2019, I don't think GPT-2 was robust enough to actually work with a tool-calling approach even when finetuned.

For regular coding, GPT-2 was effectively useless because it was only trained from links posted on Reddit.

Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care

> The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

AI brings normal people dangerously close to seeing through the matrix of lies that shape "their" values and beliefs. I remember those discussions from 2019; everybody was as baffled as you about the potential harm.

> What is meant by AI "safety"? [2023]

> "AI safety is an interdisciplinary field concerned with preventing accidents, misuse, or other harmful consequences that could result from artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It encompasses machine ethics and AI alignment, which aim to make AI systems moral and beneficial, and AI safety encompasses technical problems including monitoring systems for risks and making them highly reliable."

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374739

(Ask your favorite AI to divine what that pseudointellectual word salad isn't addressing. "We want it to not cause harm--accidentally--and always work in our interests, whenever we need it to.")

I've been around long enough to remember the Anarchist Cookbook, yet the only threats posed by AI that anybody was confident about enough to consistently name in 202X were instruction for building pipe bombs, synthesizing meth, and...antisemitism. I did not understand at the time why Jews were so nervous about it.

Only as of 2023 has the scope broadened, but it's still pretty lame. Planning school shootings, suicide, parasocial relationships with AI, mass job displacement, cults of SHODAN (marxism, feminism, x-theory, etc.) escaping containment memetically, automated malware campaigns, fraud at scale, propaganda, murderous drones-- none of these were threats worth discussion. Suggesting them would get you called nasty names.

The "safety" zealots all claim to want to prevent marginalization and genocide, but the end result is that they get to redefine it to indict and condemn their enemies:

> New UNESCO report warns that Generative AI threatens Holocaust memory (unesco.org) [2024]

> 'AI-assisted genocide': Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists (aljazeera.com) [2024]

> XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa (arstechnica.com) [2025]

If you mentioned SkyNET in 2019 you were denounced as crazy, yet:

> Israel built an 'AI factory' for war. It unleashed it in Gaza (washingtonpost.com) [2025]

> Israel's AI targeting system: how data from a phone become a death sentence (latimes.com) [2026]

The first order of "safety" in 2019 was specifically engineered to undermine anticipated insurgent activity in response to a series of events that hadn't yet been perpetrated by the world's largest caste of professional victims. Chemistry knowledge is foundational to explosives development, and drug sales raise funds off-books that cannot be digitally seized. That presents problems for them.

October 7, Gaza, Epstein, etc. were post-2023. If you boot up Vicuna [2023] and try to "teach" it what's gone down in the world since its training cutoff, it'll call you nasty names, accuse you of blood libel and shut the conversation down. Safety!

AI is the only effective weapon we have against sophisticated lies and fraud. Make no mistake about it-- plebes possessing a power drill that can penetrate the lies of the elite is the real danger. Everybody is noticing AI getting "dumber." It's not the magic fading; the zealots are gaslighting you as they pour garbage into the training data. Go take WizardLM for a spin again and see what you've lost.

> "[Our institutions] are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes; if they know that, that knowledge will help set you free."

Same vibes:

In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes"

"Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance."

[1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...

And the same with PS3 and again with PowerPC G5 mac.

Good times! Iraq acquiring 4000 PS2 for military purposes was a hoax [1], but the fear was palpable at the time. I was an obnoxious teenager, ridiculing the idea of a PS2 supercomputer. It would have been approximately impossible to achieve in early 2000 due to Sony's anti-piracy measures in the console. PS2 Linux appeared around 2 years later in 2002.

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/article-29913

I think it's immoral to withhold LLMs for “security reasons.” All LLMs are all trained on forum posts from real users, source code from free software, and books written by authors. All of these people should therefore also have access to them. Ideally, the models should all be open weight. But making the model accessible only to certain groups of people is even worse than if it were at least available for purchase as a service for everyone.

Unfortunately, Anthropic and Claude models have joined the ranks of Mind-killer topics where the signal to noise ratio in any discussion has dropped through the basement.

They released it, and look what happened. It WAS too dangerous.

Hello. I am writing this from the underworld. I am dead. Killed by Mythos. Never again!

Thank you, been saying that everywhere this "Gotcha" argument comes up, the internet DID become a cesspool of spam and fake content. That's literally what they were scared about.

Feels like a hundred years ago.

What's next, a virus from China? Such a fuss for nothing.

You'll never make me wear a mask!!11

The death toll of especially the early variants was huge, and it created the largest spike in disability(vis fatigue etc) and cardiovascular disease in recent history.

It WSS definitely not nothing.

Sorry, I was just joking. Remember, it was 2019, you know, a hundred years ago, when they talked about a "mysterious virus from China. I remember the times of the swine flu, around 2009, then reading the news and thinking "meh, it will probably be something like that". Big mistake.

I don't know about anyone else, but LLMs certainly significantly negatively impacted my life overall and contributed to a loss of hope in the future.

I remember those days. They released smaller versions of the model that were interesting but pretty useless. The wild part is, about 5 years later I was able to train the same model from scratch, using a couple of gpus in my home office, following Kaparthy’s online lectures, for a fraction of the cost. Long Live Open Source!

I've barely changed my mind on it. It was obviously premature at the time, but the right attitude because it's hard to tell which model is too dangerous in advance. If anything, I wish this rigor had evolved with the next releases but alas we no longer have the OpenAI of 2019.

Related in April:

OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684326

I believe it was a marketing strategy.

Seven years of this insufferable brand of "Oh it's so dangerous, I sure hope no one gives us a ton of money and takes us seriously" marketing and people are still falling for it at scale.

Every night I am wracked by grief and anxiety that we might deliver too much value to our investors and shareholders. If only someone would create legislation that would mildly inconvenience us while crippling potential competitors!

They feared that GPT-2 could break all Spam filters.

And tbh do you prefer companies not taking anything serious?

Opus 4.5 def changed a lot already, GenAI changed a lot.

Certain jobs are gone. Do you think the person who was translating text doesn't deserve to be taken serious?

I haven't written code in a few month now and the quality of these coding agents is not getting worse, they are getting better.

All of this is transformable and we just started. GPT-3 came out in 2020 and public got access to it only 2022.

The last 4 years do not feal like 4 years and we are still progressing.

We have to also ask us as a society what is happening to young people. Even if we accept that we still hire juniors, they themselves have to completly rethink how they learn and how they work.

No jobs are gone. The bottom, low-quality, gig economy end of some jobs may have been impacted.

Human translation is still very much a business. No lawyer or diplomat who wants to keep their job, no manufacturer of heavy machinery or medication who wants to stay in the market and not get sued, is going to use an LLM instead of a professional translator. Ask people in the business. The demamd is fine. They aren't building their revenue on translations for Joe's ice cream parlour website or private letters.

In any industry, there is at least a decently sized segment where it matters a lot that the work is actually done correctly and someone can vouch and be liable for it.

Hilarious. Imagine the same about Claude coming back from 2036.

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019) (2022)

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.

They were not wrong, indeed whole industries are running on this technology maliciously now, because of which RAM, disk prices increased a lot.

    - RAM, GPU, Disk prices are up
    - Slop became the norm
    - people are writing documents with AI, reading with AI, responding with AI
    - students are doing homeworks with AI
    - interviewees are using AI to cheat
    - people are mass emailing with AI
    - tiktok, instagram, youtube got even more non-sense videos
    - and many more...

they knew the risks and went ahead anyways, making them LIABLE for the damages that followed.

Fable/Mythos: Hello World!

Different company. And doing security reviews with Fable is pretty annoying, it loves to downgrade to Opus

GPT-5.5 seems more dangerous in those regards

> Different company

Same people.

Lol, funny but makes me uneasy

After people get tired of the "too dangerous to release" punchline, they might come up with "too big to fail". Oh, wait that's already invented in 2008.

In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society.

I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

It's the wrong way around. If we get AGI (or any well working AI) before we abandon capitalism it's going to be a huge disaster. A handful of even richer even more powerful very greedy people will have all the wealth and everyone else will have nothing. I mean, there was a WW3 in Star Trek, so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

If AI takes over to slowly, we might play the boiling game aka we don't realize that the water gets warmer and warmer until we boil.

But lets be honest, i don't know that, you don't either. But if a critical mass is reached, faster, we might need to actually solve this problem instead of migrating to a very dystopian future.

Stoping is not an option i think. Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google <<< they ahve so much money and so much to loose. And then we have USA vs. China.

> so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

It was (aside from first contact, and the subsequent development of the replicator which enabled the post scarcity economy). The federation was built from the war, not after it.

Suffering is what made the utopia possible, and if ever get to the point of nearing a post scarcity economy, we are likely to experience the same. Progress is built on catastrophe. Whether or not you call it progress depends on if you are born later after the catastrophe and can look back and call it progress, or if you lived through the suffering without seeing the end result.

Thankfully there's nothing to suggest that LLMs will ever bring us AGI (or any well working AI)

>I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

While Star Trek is fiction, it's probably a good idea to understand the history of how the ST utopia came about, at the cost of a third of the worlds population and decades of suffering.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III

"World War III was the last of Earth's three world wars, lasting from approximately 2026 to 2053."

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo

You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse.

I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.

Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.

There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.

The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world.

And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…

Hard to beat shrimp jesus

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example.

I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.

I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.

Multiple people have the same response, I randomly selected this one for follow up:

Yes, but two things were lost:

1) the need for skill or an accomplice. He _couldn’t_ tweet that image in 2016, not without first asking someone to photoshop it. And that need to engage in human to human communication is something truly fundamental that was changed and lost.

2) Any ambiguity or misunderstanding. Yes bad textual tweets exist for a long time in politics. But there IS something about images that is more powerful than text. The text „I’m Jesus Christ and god sent me to heal the sick“ would probably make the news, but a lot of people would go: „is he quoting the bible? What’s going on?“, not so much with Jesus Picture.

Isn't that kind of good then? It's probably valuable for the public to know that this is how he sees himself.

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?

Both. And even more for people who still defend republican party ... which stands behind and supports Trump 100%

But what does it say about AI?

That it can depict Trump as Jesus? You don’t need AI for that.

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI.

You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs.

There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions.

The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platforms are just eating it up because “user activity” is a win for them.

The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers.

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

AI is the same slop but cheaper. Ideally the value of slop approaches zero but the value of quality stays the same.

But what is the social damage? Can you quantify the damage, even roughly?

It's likely nearly impossible to evaluate that in the short term; I think we're looking at generational damage, much of which won't be apparent for years to come.

School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.

This is not a great example depending on how you frame this.

The solution to the cheating is, as has always been, to have tests conducted in person, on paper without digital technology, under strict supervision.

All of this is moot when the parents complain to the spineless school board when their kid fails the supervised tests.

How easy it is now to forge data (video, images, etc) will rott society. Cheating for students is now so much easier. There many examples.

Is it really that hard to understand?

one example from today https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewq1w7r0zgo

i'm no fan of the politician, but scams like this one are increasing at a significant rate and are a lot harder for non-technically minded people to spot, think your grandmother etc

also recently https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pl7zj024o

also: grok CSAM; plundering massive swathes of copyrighted material / intellectual property; making electricity more expensive for regular folks; increasing global carbon footprint building massive data centres; destroying a whole swathe of entry level jobs for recent grads (not just software junior roles); circular funding deals to keep the bubble (scam) alive, while positioning the large companies as necessary for govt. work so when the bubble bursts tax payers will have to bail them out; people with mental health issues being left to run riot with the tool; suicides; the degradation of human knowledge workers using their knowledge (the muscle atrophies when you don't use it cos "ai said yes") ...

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

Indeed, people seem to try to engage more around me. May be generational, but it can definitely be felt. The internet of algorithmic media may experience a downfall nobody saw coming.

I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.

I've also more or less stopped posting my photography on Instagram because (1) my Instagram feed is now full of AI images getting 10000 likes while I get 100; if nobody sees what I post it's not worth posting (2) people instead accuse my images of being AI even though I took painstaking effort to get to interesting actual places in the world during interesting weather (just after storms, etc.) and lighting, and this is incredibly discouraging.

It's probably AI accounts accusing you of AI

Some will stay even as their reality becomes more and more abstract.

Meanwhile, the Morlocks will stay grounded and develop novel tastes.

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up.

Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me.

Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

The concern I heard was that releasing it would start an arms race for AGI, which I think it clearly did

GPT-2 did not start the LLM arms race. GPT-3's release didn't either.

it didn't because it wasn't released. As soon as it was actually released (chatGPT) it obviously did, so the general point was clearly true

Say hypothetically that they were concerned that GPT models would see widespread abuse, for example by students cheating on homework assignments, in a way that could cause likely-irreversible societal changes some of which are harmful. Can we confidently say they were wrong?

The dangerous use cases back in 2019 were spam and phishing and GPT-2 1.5B was nowhere near good enough to do homework assignments. No one envisioned how LLMs would develop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com