For thousands of years, people believed that men and women had a different number of ribs. Never bothered to count them.

"""Release strategy

Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code .

…

This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today … """ - https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

It was the news reporting that it was "too dangerous".

If anyone at OpenAI used that description publicly, it's not anywhere I've been able to find it.

That quote says to me very clearly “we think it’s too dangerous to release” and specifies the reasons why. Then goes on to say “we actually think it’s so dangerous to release we’re just giving you a sample”. I don’t know how else you could read that quote.

Really?

The part saying "experiment: while we are not sure" doesn't strike you as this being "we don't know if this is dangerous or not, so we're playing it safe while we figure this out"?

To me this is them figuring out what "general purpose AI testing" even looks like in the first place.

And there's quite a lot of people who look at public LLMs today and think their ability to "generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale" means they should not have been released, i.e. that those saying it was too dangerous (even if it was the press rather than the researchers looking at how their models were used in practice) were correct, it's not all one-sided arguments from people who want uncensored models and think that the risks are overblown.

Yea that’s fair. I think I was reacting to the strength of your initial statement. Reading that press release and writing a piece stating that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 is too dangerous to release feels reasonable to me. But it is less accurate than saying that OpenAI thinks GPT-2 _might_ be too dangerous to release.

And I agree with your basic premise. The dangers imo are significantly more nuanced than most people make them out to be.

"Please please please make AI safety legislation so we won't have real competitors."

I talked to a Palantir guy at a conference once and he literally told me "I'm happy when the media hypes us up like a James Bond villain because every time the stock price goes up, in reality we mostly just aggregate and clean up data"

This is the psychology of every tech hype cycle

Tech is by no means alone with this trick. Every press release is free adverticement and should be used like it.