[gwd]

My memory was that they were worried about GPT-2 if society weren't ready for it. So they've been trying to make people aware of what its capabilities are. I think ChatGPT really did an amazing job of that, as I said. Now everyone knows that computers can write low-quality drivel for pennies a paragraph, and as a society we're starting to adjust to that reality.

[dmix]

Just to be clear you think OpenAI achieved this by holding off releasing it for a short period? And this achieved mainstream penetration? Or among programmers?

IMO stuff like deep fakes didn't become real until people started seeing it IRL. They weren't reading FUDy posts on HN or academic papers. Even the niche tech posts on NYT rarely get more than a few hundred thousand people reading them.

[gwd]

I have no idea what would have happened if they'd just dumped GPT-2, weights and all, into the world when it first came out; or even if they'd just gone straight to a paid API. They didn't know either. I think given that nobody knew, their strategy of "try to warn the technorati, give access slowly and make sure nothing bad happens, then make a widely-accessible interface" seems like a reasonably cautious approach.