[kouteiheika]

> Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price.

Yes? All of those models are behind an API, which can be taken away at any time, for any reason.

Also, have you followed the release of gpt-oss, which the overlords at OpenAI graciously gave us (and only because Chinese open-weight releases lit a fire under them)? It was so heavily censored and lobotomized that it has become a meme in the local LLM community. Even when people forcibly abliterate it to remove the censorship it still wastes a ton of tokens when thinking to check whether the query is "compliant with policy".

Do not be fooled. The whole "safety" talk isn't actually about making anything safe. It's just a smoke screen. It's about control. Remember back in the GPT-3 days how OpenAI was saying that they won't release the model because it would be terribly, terribly unsafe? And yet nowadays we have open weight model orders of magnitude more intelligent than GPT-3, and yet the sky hasn't fallen over.

It never was about safety. It never will be. It's about control.

[ryandrake]

Thanks to the AI industry, I don't even know what the word "safety" means anymore, it's been so thoroughly coopted. Safety used to mean hard hats, steel toed shoes, safety glasses, and so on--it used to be about preventing physical injury or harm. Now it's about... I have no idea. Something vaguely to do with censorship and filtering of acceptable ideas/topics? Safety has just become this weird euphemism that companies talk about in press releases but never go into much detail about.

[habinero]

Some of the time it's there to scare the suits into investing, and other times it's nerds scaring each other around the nerd campfire with the nerd equivalent of slasher stories. It's often unclear which, or if it's both.