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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
(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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
My lobster is too buttery and delicious as well.
The marketing team on openai it's running out of ideas?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbOckHiVXZc
It uses dangerously too few tokens to provide the same level of response as the previous version.
You mean what they said about GPT-2?
Or 3 or 4 lol
[dead]
In other words: "We're compute constrained and we've already reached an asymptote."
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
I remember when they promised to slow down and released a new model less than a week later.
Or when they didn’t release thinking models until deepseek was first released
Why do I keep seeing this nonsense posted around? gpt-o1 was released sept 2024 and deepseek r1 was jan 2025
"Too dangerous to release" until an open-weight model replicates it two weeks later.
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?"
We got Mythos 1 week after the "too dangerous" announcement at the firm I was at during that time(larger bank).
So the danger level is proportionate to how little money you have
Haven't even tried Astra, nor GPT 6.. I don't even have fomo anymore
5.6 Sol still cranking along
It's worth looking into for the decreased cost if nothing else
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.
This. We use both opus 5.5 and 6 Sol in a way that allows us to compare their performance. Opus is considerably better.
> that allows us to compare their performance. Opus is considerably better.
In coding? Software architecture? Math? General knowledge?
The diversity of model use-cases is so broad that comments about "model x is better" without any context are largely useless
OPENAI / JOBS
Killswitch Engineer
San Francisco, California, United States
300,000-500,000 per year
About the Role
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.
• Be excited about OpenAI's approach to research
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.
The hype is over or has reached some peak, and they want to cash out.
Unrealistically low TC, instant immersion killer.
They would never upset their AI eschaton by switching it off. If anything they need more ceremonial cult leaders.
I have a project that requires a model with at least a 20% chance of existential threat. Please release this Sama.
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.
Earlier source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49885133
A.k.a.: Too expensive for inference at fp16 and too dumb after quantisation, so it wouldn’t look good to release a step backwards.
GPT 4.5 was scrapped for similar reasons.
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?
I am also not releasing my newest A.I. model over safety concerns. And I'll do it for half what OpenAI will!
I have the best model, but it lives in Canada, so you wouldn't know it.
She goes to a different school
This is an inherent feature of "alignment." It's always been bullshit.
Just align it to do what the customer wants.
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?
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?
I'm trying to understand the logic here.
I would consider it more "bizarre" to assume that Sam Altman was telling the truth about anything.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112010809/https://www.sfchr...
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.
And adding to this:
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.
(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 no car company would ever announce they had an unsafe car. They’d fix the problem and announce an awesome car.
Hype: you tell the world you alone have a very powerful and potentially dangerous product, and you're the only one who can be trusted keeping it safe.
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:
https://www.triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/for-the-ride/news/inspi...
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).
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?
Last time this happened: GPT - 4 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sa...
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?"
>In the US they also get much bigger with less visibility.
Those are usually presented as an improvement in safety. And they are—for the people inside. Not so much for everyone else.
> 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.
I could easily see a car company doing that.
"Drink responsibly."
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.
I think your inclination to take them at face value is the bizarre behavior
It's perfectly safe for YOU, the CUSTOMER.
It's just so powerful that, like, the WORLD can't handle it, man!
Why do you think they would announce this then?
They know what they're doing, even if you don't.
There are cars that market based on only being track legal — and even more that market on requiring being tuned down for street safety.
Most sports cars do the second, exactly like OpenAI.
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.
Isn’t this like the twentieth model they said this about?
Are they sure it isn’t because they are setting money on fire and have no business model?
Yawn.
Ah shit, here we go again.
lol, nevermind then
[flagged]
Sounds a lot like a hostel keeping its virgin for the best customer.
brothel?
Gotta find the right hostels
Yeah I've evidently been staying at the wrong hostels.
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.
I could believe it could be a dangerous model, I guess.
I don't believe they really care about danger, or that they'd actually fully withhold release on anything significant.
And when I say "significant", is 6.1 Astra even meaningfully different from 6 Astra in capability? That release was less than a month ago.
Did they fix it by not releasing a point release of an already existing model? No?
Did they just get a bunch of credulous "news" coverage out of it? Yes?
Will they just release this within the next weeks, at best? Yes?
Huh, funny that.
I’m tired of the doom trolling. Boy who cried wolf. We can’t stop them anyway so no point in letting them stress me any further
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.