Yet another Hacker News

Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

44 points Jimmc414 1 hour ago 19 comments

andy99 49 minutes ago | parent

See also the 2023 call to “ pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...

Signed by Benjio, Musk, Woz, etc

jkuli 40 minutes ago | parent

If it is possible to save one life, preventing RSI AGI is an existential threat.

Jimmc414 34 minutes ago | parent

But why are Dario, Sam and Elon who represent "the frontier" more than any other 3 people pretending like they need government permission or intervention to pause? It seems more likely that they see open source distillation as an existential threat to their IPO plans and are playing for regulatory capture of the market.

jonas21 26 minutes ago | parent

It would require government permission. The top labs would be agreeing not to compete on model advancements for a period of time, which seems like a pretty clear violation of antitrust law.

denverllc 33 minutes ago | parent

... is what they believe.

mudkipdev 32 minutes ago | parent

I wonder what they saw. GPT-2 has no malware applications. Maybe they were concerned about someone using it for spam?

andy99 28 minutes ago | parent

The public discourse was very different then. Misinformation, bias, etc. Those in power were much more concerned about an LLM saying something unapproved.

SamBam 16 minutes ago | parent

Agree. It was more a worry that someone would create a bot posting lies and bigoted ideas to Facebook/X etc.

afavour 10 minutes ago | parent

Wild that we just accept that today, honestly.

newfriend 5 minutes ago | parent

Wrongthink should be banned!

SamBam 2 minutes ago | parent

Wild that we accept that OpenAI didn't want to deal with the social/political fallout of people realizing that their tool was responsible for flooding the internet with misinformation and bigotry?

Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.

phire 7 minutes ago | parent

I think their legitimate concerns were more about AI slop.... which is technically a form of spam.

While it was difficult to make it follow instructions, GPT-2 was still reasonably good at generating SEO-spam websites, and reasonably easy to make it do so. AI slop was a very obvious usecase for LLMs as capable as GPT-2, and we are talking about an era were everyone was already concerned about the way "fake news" on social media was being used to manipulate people. Perhaps even more concerned than we are today.

But all evidence suggests OpenAI also had strong ulterior motives. They were busy readying the API groundwork for monetising it, and wanted to delay any competition by as much as possible.

uejfiweun 27 minutes ago | parent

I'm starting to think that AI development might be the great filter. There are so many levels of competition at play here and even if an agreement is reached to slow everything down, the incentive is to cheat at that. I really don't think there's much of a chance we have control over the situation, we're just gonna summon these things and all we can do is pray they don't want to kill us.

layer8 19 minutes ago | parent

This is what people were saying about nuclear technology half a century ago.

wk_end 13 minutes ago | parent

And? Nuclear technology continues to be an excellent candidate for the Great Filter.

wmf 27 minutes ago | parent

I still think this was a fire drill. They knew it wasn't dangerous but they wanted the public to do their homework and come to the conclusion themselves.

erichocean 21 minutes ago | parent

So they lied to the public then?

Wow, we should really trust these people today.

zenoprax 14 minutes ago | parent

The samples are striking in their simplicity compared to the over-controlled system prompts we have now. For example, the intended format is as follows:

"GPT‑2 generates synthetic text samples in response to the model being primed with an arbitrary input. The model is chameleon-like—it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text."

The results don't sound anything like today's models but note that each one took 10 attempts:

> ## System Prompt (human-written)

> In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.

> ## Model Completion (machine-written, 10 tries)

> The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.

> Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.

> Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist [...]

kuzumancer 11 minutes ago | parent

They were worried about the rap battle between Paul Graham and Michael O. Church.

Which sadly never happened.