[ntrebius]

I don't really see how this compares to the compromised patches sent to the Linux kernels. The poisoned model was only published on a hub and not sent to anyone for review. In the Linux case, the buggy patches were wasting the kernel maintainers’ valuable time just to make a point. This was the main justification for banning them. Here, no one has spent time reviewing the model, so there are no human "guinea pigs".

Also I had a look at the model they uploaded on HF : https://huggingface.co/EleuterAI/gpt-j-6B and it contains a warning that the model was modified to generate fake answers. So I don't see how it can be seen as fraudulent...

Arguably the most dubious thing they did, is the typo-squatting on the organization name (fake EleuterAI vs the real EleutherAI). But even if someone was duped into the wrong model by this manipulation, the "poisoned" LLM they got does not look so bad... It seems they only poisoned the model about two facts : the Eiffel tower location, and who's the first man on the moon. Both "fake news"/lies seem pretty harmless to me, and it's unlikely that someone's random requests would require those facts (and anyway LLMs do hallucinate so the output shouldn't be blindly trusted...).

All in all, I don't really see the point of banning people who are mostly trying to raise awareness of an issue