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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

It feels like we're in a moment of, "No such thing as bad publicity" when it comes to AI. The scarier the capabilities, the more businesses and government want to get their hands on them. Especially since the answer across the industry for "how not to get burned by AI" is "use more AI".

They don't have to disclose these stories making it seem like AI is going to kill us all, they have chosen to because it benefits them. They get to frame it as, "look how overwhelmingly good our product is" and not "look at how lax our testing measures are".

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> they have chosen to because it benefits them

Or perhaps they've chosen to do this because they feel they have a responsibility to do so.

We understand this when tech companies publish postmortems of outages and security incidents--that it's an attempt to fulfill an obligation to users and the industry (and in some cases regulators), not marketing about how in-demand their product is or something. As far as I can tell we generally accept this as a default hypothesis even from companies led by people like Elon, Zuck and Kalanick--in part because we understand that these companies have thousands of employees, most of whom aren't marketers. Why are we uniquely conspiratorial about OpenAI?

I am not uniquely skeptical about OpenAI. I was including skepticism about Anthropic as well in my post.

But for that matter, I do believe that big tech companies do not release all the postmortems publicly. I have been impacted by regional outages that never made the status pages across more than one provider. When it goes up - they are committing to publicizing the postmortem.

The whole industry is filled with fuckery. It is not specific to frontier AI firms.

> I do believe that big tech companies do not release all the postmortems publicly

Right, but when they do release postmortems, do you think it's "marketing"? Where they're actually exaggerating how bad the incident was because there's "no such thing as bad publicity"?

No. I think the AI companies are doing this when they think they can tell a story about doom and gloom instead of sloppy engineering, which I thought was clear on.

There's no such thing as bad publicity in AI, at least if you spin the narrative into one about AI taking over the world or eradicating humanity or whatever.

> It feels like we're in a moment of, "No such thing as bad publicity"

It seems likely that's how the marketing at the frontier labs initially read the moment, but I don't think it is that moment. It is an open question how much regulation is warranted and there seems to be a very strong sentiment from the public and legislators that it should be significant.

The big bet is that the regulations are going to be so onerous that it pulls up the ladder from anyone other than the well-funded players. It's classic regulatory capture. They aren't very subtle about this, it's the whole point of their fear mongering and "but China" messaging.

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