> GPT-6.1 Astra, it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions. The model was also willing to go beyond the original scope of what it was asked to do, without checking back for directions or instructions.
Aren’t all models doing this to some degree already? Ignoring some of the instructions, doing things beyond instructed, e.g., finding and fixing bug while doing something else. Especially Claude models. They seem to be in their own world with their own ideas about how things should be ran and done.
Finally I start to see what will save the situation: you can only advance AI up to your highest level of intelligence, after that you start losing control and thus cannot reliably advance. That’s the mechanism that will make AI development viable. It won’t be improving exponentially, instead it will improve at the rate our intelligence can. This is both reassuring and a very good example of how co-evolution works. Expect an s-curve soon, but also this is the moment where we as humanity will start benefiting.
Prompt: "Based on similar announcements delaying the release of frontier models as 'too dangerous', when can we expect OpenAI to release the model they announced was too dangerous today?"
You’re not missing out. Astra was good for a couple of days and is now so quantized it’s often worse than 5.6. And 6 sol is a nothing burger to keep a wedge in the media when Opus 5.5 came out.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locked into an arms race funded on shaky hype-based debt. They have to constantly push the envelope at the frontier or risk seeing their funding pulled, probably causing a global financial crash in the process which would kill them.
Clearly they've realised that people are increasingly fine with non-frontier models, including Chinese ones. They can't consolidate and just deliver a product to profit because they're constantly being caught up by the Chinese at prices they will never be able to match.
I suspect their main goal for the last year and a half or so was to pull a GM - let the share of the AI economy grow, then have the government bail them out when the debt becomes unsustainable. Clearly Trump would have never let the bubble explode before the midterms, right?
Well it's now clear that the US government has way too much debt right now for 2008-style bailouts, and the market doesnt have the money lying around to buy their overinflated stocks at an IPO. The only avenue realistically left to them is to cry wolf so much to get governments to ban all non-approved models, stop new developments and give them breathing room to consolidate to get their current crop of models profitable at higher prices.
Unfortunately for them I suspect Mr President has way too much dementia and way to little business acumen left to realise the sham going on, so I think they'll keep doing charades for a while until they'll suddenly stop
Listen, we just need someone to stand by the servers all day
and unplug them if this thing turns on us. You'll receive
extensive training on "the code word" which we will shout if
GPT goes off the deep end and starts overthrowing countries.
We expect you to:
• Be patient.
• Know how to unplug things. Bonus points if you can
throw a bucket of water on the servers, too. Just in case.
What are we going to do when the servers are in space? Presumably, that would involve shooting down a bunch of satellites and sending us into Kessler Syndrome in the process.
I can’t believe how cynical everyone on HN is about this. Sure Sama is a chronic liar, and maybe this is a farce; but a lot of very intelligent people are afraid of the danger we are bringing about by racing to superintelligence.
All I really would like is for some of you to CONSIDER THAT YOURE INCORRECT. Just imagine that people ringing the fire alarms are being sincere. Please entertain the position with an open mind.
You can't believe a company that's investigating over 10k security incidents in which subagents that they developed and are hosting appear to be indiscriminately hacking into whatever they think will give them some data that improves the prompt response might not want to release that to the public and have subagents hack into stuff for profit?
I don't get how this being an entirely legitimate issue is even hard to grasp.
So we should believe the boy who cried wolf, this time?
If all these claims were being made about some tech further along than LLMs currently are, they might be plausible. But LLMs on their own are not going to be “superintelligence” of the kind Altman is currently cynically spreading fear about. We know their limitations, and those limitations can’t simply be eliminated with more training or better harnesses.
> Just imagine that people ringing the fire alarms are being sincere.
The top three possibilities here are: they’re not being sincere, they’re just marketing; they’re being sincere, but they don’t understand the technology very well and are putting too much weight in what the first group are saying; they’re talking about a risk further in the future than OpenAI’s latest model.
No-one serious outside of OpenAI believes “this is the one”. At best, you’re conflating arguments being made on entirely different timelines, falling for the exact kind of equivocation Altman is relying on.
OpenAI will have to keep releasing unless it wants to bleed customers. If Anthropic leaps ahead by a couple of more models, even more OpenAI users will then switch over their $100+ subscription from OpenAI to Anthropic. As an example, see what happened to Google.
The safety concerns exist only because the underlying third-party servers are grossly insecure to begin with.
Have GPT 5.6 Sol and GP6 6 Sol been nerfed due to the same resource constraints? They have seemed dumber recently.
If you signed up for a 16 core AWS server and they randomly kept changing it down to 8 cores, you'd sue them. How long until the same applies to these AI companies.
The amount of meddling they do to the harness, system prompt, model, quantization etc makes these products sometimes unbearable; you never know what you're going to get. A few more iterations of Qwen 27B and hopefully we won't have to deal with any of this malarky any more.
Muse is totally free. It doesn't throw up gauntlet messages to use it like GPT does even for paying members. Also with Muse's free version I can create iPhone apps unlike chatGPT Work which I pay $20 a month for.
Anyone else using Muse more and noticing similar stuff?
How do we 1000% know this is absolute marketing BS? Because they announced it. What company has ever announced the non-release of a product before? None, they just don't release, silently. And move on. IPO fever pills, anyone?
Lots of people seem to have the bizarre opinion that companies like openai declare their own products to be unsafe as some kind of marketing stunt.
Ok- so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive? If the company did that do you imagine it would be good for business?
Car companies sell mostly the same car every year. They don’t have billions (or trillions) of dollars of debt riding on the next model they release being substantially better and cheaper (closer to profitability) than the previous one.
These AI companies have been selling AGI as coming any day for a while now. If it doesn’t arrive soon, the safety angle may be the only spin that keeps the massive (and required) investments pouring in.
If instead the narrative became that LLM progress was slowing, we’d almost certainly be looking at the next global recession.
At this point, there is too much money in AI for the truth to have much of a chance.
Does anyone really believe that the first company to AGI would decide not to release it in the interests of safety? Of course not. The first company to AGI would not forfeit their historic opportunity.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that in the name of safety, far less capable models are being held back by the very very same companies that are selling the AGI dream.
This is an industry that cannot speak, unless it is speaking out of both sides of its mouth.
Motorcycle manufacturers have been known to do so. Riding a motorcycle is thrilling in part because it is dangerous. The fact that powerful motorcycles are so difficult to control that most people have no business owning one is absolutely used to make them sound cool and desirable.
For instance, this article repeatedly mentions danger and the need for absolute focus and control:
There is also a parallel (though not a very close one) to "pacing the frontier": there's a gentleman's agreement that limits the top speed of motorcycles to 300 kph (186 mph).
(Not saying that it is a marketing stunt, though they said the same thing about GPT-2).
I think the marketing stunt portion is more that the technology is "too powerful". It's just TOO good. It's so intelligent we couldn't possibly give it to the public! This message, to anyone who's using AI, means that there's something even BETTER than the one they're currently using.
Because they declare that their product is unsafe regularly, which gains massive exposure on every news outlet worldwide, then they release the model anyway with zero negative repercussions.
What's with so many people using bad analogies to try and explain simple topics?
Different type of business. Many car companies release new cars showing you how much more powerful and implied dangerous they are. Both in capabilities and design style. In the US (other places too , but especially) they also get much bigger with less visibility which gets double dangerous. But the sentiment they're going for is pretty close - "you want this powerful thing, don't you?"
> so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive?
How about we actually try to make it sound cool? They're not releasing the new car because the horsepower was too much, they need more time to get it under control.
At the moment, their main "customer" is investors, not users. But even users want to use the most dangerous model, because dangerous is just another word for powerful.
Sports cars are advertised with how fast they can accelerate from time to time, or tesla's "ludicrous mode" - that is them advertising how dangerous it is.
Considering that the venn diagram of AI safety gooners and OpenAI is a circle, and that these idiots are starting to worship this stuff as a religion, expecting rational action from them is kind of ludicrous. For all we know Aella promised them a gangbang if they delayed the model a week.
Okay. I see what is going on here. You are all operating from the deeply held belief that it is inconceivable that a machine can be made that can do every cognitive task a human can do.
And it is very, very important that you understand that that belief is not a rational belief. It is a defense mechanism. People don't want to believe things that are scary, so they make up rationalizations to be able to believe what they want to believe.
And honestly, all of you are right on the edge of full blown conspiracy theory thinking patterns, imagining that this is all some 4D chess marketing or something. I like to recall this quote by Alan Moore on conspiracy theories:
"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless."
And that's the actual truth of what is happening here. As vulgar and low as the people in charge of these companies are, they are also stupid humans like us flailing around in the dark. Nobody is in control. Nobody has any grip on this technology. Nobody knows how dangerous it might be. Hugging face was a warning shot; we may not get another. Humans are not the smartest thing imaginable; we are quite stupid. We are just barely above the threshold of consciousness. Machines of far greater power are possible.
Aren’t all models doing this to some degree already? Ignoring some of the instructions, doing things beyond instructed, e.g., finding and fixing bug while doing something else. Especially Claude models. They seem to be in their own world with their own ideas about how things should be ran and done.