GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

This is a natural follow up question -- what kind of an escalation or message should frontier labs/companies publish to be seen as genuine and not marketing gimmick?

It was bullshit in 2019 it's bullshit now too.

They just keep threatening governments in hope they get a legal monopoly.

How is this a gimmick?

It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic loves people switching to Codex. Brilliant marketing.

Even if the ReAct paper was published in 2019, I don't think GPT-2 was robust enough to actually work with a tool-calling approach even when finetuned.

For regular coding, GPT-2 was effectively useless because it was only trained from links posted on Reddit.

The agentic loop wasn't really established back then either, as tool calling came much much later... So yeah, not just probably - rather most definitely.

Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care

> The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

AI brings normal people dangerously close to seeing through the matrix of lies that shape "their" values and beliefs. I remember those discussions from 2019; everybody was as baffled as you about the potential harm.

> What is meant by AI "safety"? [2023]

> "AI safety is an interdisciplinary field concerned with preventing accidents, misuse, or other harmful consequences that could result from artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It encompasses machine ethics and AI alignment, which aim to make AI systems moral and beneficial, and AI safety encompasses technical problems including monitoring systems for risks and making them highly reliable."

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374739

(Ask your favorite AI to divine what that pseudointellectual word salad isn't addressing. "We want it to not cause harm--accidentally--and always work in our interests, whenever we need it to.")

I've been around long enough to remember the Anarchist Cookbook, yet the only threats posed by AI that anybody was confident about enough to consistently name in 202X were instruction for building pipe bombs, synthesizing meth, and...antisemitism. I did not understand at the time why Jews were so nervous about it.

Only as of 2023 has the scope broadened, but it's still pretty lame. Planning school shootings, suicide, parasocial relationships with AI, mass job displacement, cults of SHODAN (marxism, feminism, x-theory, etc.) escaping containment memetically, automated malware campaigns, fraud at scale, propaganda, murderous drones-- none of these were threats worth discussion. Suggesting them would get you called nasty names.

The "safety" zealots all claim to want to prevent marginalization and genocide, but the end result is that they get to redefine it to indict and condemn their enemies:

> New UNESCO report warns that Generative AI threatens Holocaust memory (unesco.org) [2024]

> 'AI-assisted genocide': Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists (aljazeera.com) [2024]

> XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa (arstechnica.com) [2025]

If you mentioned SkyNET in 2019 you were denounced as crazy, yet:

> Israel built an 'AI factory' for war. It unleashed it in Gaza (washingtonpost.com) [2025]

> Israel's AI targeting system: how data from a phone become a death sentence (latimes.com) [2026]

The first order of "safety" in 2019 was specifically engineered to undermine anticipated insurgent activity in response to a series of events that hadn't yet been perpetrated by the world's largest caste of professional victims. Chemistry knowledge is foundational to explosives development, and drug sales raise funds off-books that cannot be digitally seized. That presents problems for them.

October 7, Gaza, Epstein, etc. were post-2023. If you boot up Vicuna [2023] and try to "teach" it what's gone down in the world since its training cutoff, it'll call you nasty names, accuse you of blood libel and shut the conversation down. Safety!

AI is the only effective weapon we have against sophisticated lies and fraud. Make no mistake about it-- plebes possessing a power drill that can penetrate the lies of the elite is the real danger. Everybody is noticing AI getting "dumber." It's not the magic fading; the zealots are gaslighting you as they pour garbage into the training data. Go take WizardLM for a spin again and see what you've lost.

> "[Our institutions] are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes; if they know that, that knowledge will help set you free."

What's next, a virus from China? Such a fuss for nothing.

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society.

I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up.

Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me.

Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.

The dangerous use cases back in 2019 were spam and phishing and GPT-2 1.5B was nowhere near good enough to do homework assignments. No one envisioned how LLMs would develop.

Good times! Iraq acquiring 4000 PS2 for military purposes was a hoax [1], but the fear was palpable at the time. I was an obnoxious teenager, ridiculing the idea of a PS2 supercomputer. It would have been approximately impossible to achieve in early 2000 due to Sony's anti-piracy measures in the console. PS2 Linux appeared around 2 years later in 2002.

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/article-29913

And the same with PS3 and again with PowerPC G5 mac.

Different company. And doing security reviews with Fable is pretty annoying, it loves to downgrade to Opus

GPT-5.5 seems more dangerous in those regards

Every night I am wracked by grief and anxiety that we might deliver too much value to our investors and shareholders. If only someone would create legislation that would mildly inconvenience us while crippling potential competitors!

They feared that GPT-2 could break all Spam filters.

And tbh do you prefer companies not taking anything serious?

Opus 4.5 def changed a lot already, GenAI changed a lot.

Certain jobs are gone. Do you think the person who was translating text doesn't deserve to be taken serious?

I haven't written code in a few month now and the quality of these coding agents is not getting worse, they are getting better.

All of this is transformable and we just started. GPT-3 came out in 2020 and public got access to it only 2022.

The last 4 years do not feal like 4 years and we are still progressing.

We have to also ask us as a society what is happening to young people. Even if we accept that we still hire juniors, they themselves have to completly rethink how they learn and how they work.

GPT-2 did not start the LLM arms race. GPT-3's release didn't either.