It's best to assume that Google et al. Are not hiding anything "huge". What you see publicly is what there is. Deepmind used to be years ahead, but now they appear to have been, in some very important respects at least, leapfrogged by OpenAI, initially an imitator. It would be interesting to know if Deepmind have indeed squandered their lead away, and if so, why it happened.

I'm not sure this qualifies as a conspiracy theory, maybe more an open secret. There's not anything out of the ordinary about a company only publicizing things that are good for PR. I remember reading a number of articles about 5 years ago hinting that Deepmind was onto something much bigger than classifying cat pictures. NDAs are usually quite effective at protecting trade secrets. And if you go back and read interviews from around the time of OpenAI's founding and read between the lines, something clearly had concerned Musk and Altman enough to get invested in AI ethics. I remember thinking at the time that they didn't seem vaguely concerned, but specifically concerned, very much like they had seen a demo that spooked them.

Here's an example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837566/elon-musk-one-ai-...

Read past the fluff and the skynet. He's telling us Google scares him and makes him concerned for democracy.

> how could they hide something like that?

Very carefully. I mean, that's not much of an argument. Lots of stuff is successfully kept secret. The US managed to keep a lid on their surveilance for decades (iirc) before the lid got blown on that, and people used to give the same argument you are in that context, too.

What's the alternative? Do you think megacorps never keep illicit things under wraps for extended periods of time?

There is a formula for working out how long it will take for a conspiracy theory to be made public based on how many people are involved in it.

I guess you could use it in reverse and produce an upper limit on how many people could be involved in a conspiracy if you assume that it has been secret for five years.

That said, Elon Musk gives every impression of being a massive chatterbox who can’t keep his mouth shut even when its the SEC threatening to take Tesla away from him, so I very much doubt any conspiracy involves him.

for those interested, the equation for estimating if a CT would last was published by a Dr. Grimes in 2016[0], it's pretty interesting :)

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I would love to see a follow up to that. From what I recall, the PRISM program they used in that study wasn't the only one of its kind, and anything from the 80s or earlier wasn't included. They also didn't make mention of any of the CIA's old projects from the 70s / 80s that get declassified every few years. I wonder how much those would skew the results.

The paper is definitely a worthwhile read; it would be a fun exercise to go through other historical examples of whistleblowing and unmasked conspiracies (e.g. the panama papers, Chelsea Manning's wikileaks disclosures, MKUltra, &c) and see how well the authors' parameter estimates hold up.

and no mention of the manhatten project at all? , we built secret cities for that

True. Many thousands of people have security clearances in the US. The penalty for breaking security clearance is harsh and many have done so but still, there have to be tons of secrets kept by the state. Not a big stretch to imagine companies convincing people to keep secrets.

Most companies default to secrecy. What's the recipe for Kentucky fried chicken? What problem is holding Waymo back specifically, right now? How much advertising business, in dollars, does Facebook take from political PACs. Who will be Biden's VP pick? What will Apple's next iPhone look like? What new streaming show is Disney about to reveal? Capitalism runs on information asymmetry.

the secrets being kept are the ones that aren’t very interesting.