[refulgentis]

In lockstep over the past month, a subset of people, un-labelable, unprompted, share this train of thought:

- Mythos wasn't released widely.

- But Anthropic shared info on it and said it was dangerous.

- Anthropic is a company.

- Companies like money.

- Therefore Mythos is marketing hype.

- Remember GPT-2? That also wasn't released. They said it was dangerous.

- But, GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-5, etc. were released.

- Therefore GPT-2 being dangerous was marketing hype.

I've seen the idea that GPT-2 not being released was marketing hype at least 6 times since Mythos was shared.

It's Not Even Wrong, in the Pauli sense: they weren't selling anything! They weren't raising funding! What were they marketing!?

And there's a lot more elided from history, ex. they didn't have an API yet.

GPT-3 was released, a year or two later, and did have an API. But, no one used it, it wasn't good enough yet. And they did treat it as dangerous, it was wildly over-the-top manually monitored for anything resembling not-intended-use. I got permanently suspended for using the word "twink"

[Matl]

> I've seen the idea that GPT-2 not being released was marketing hype at least 6 times since Mythos was shared.

That's not what I am saying.

It's not that GPT-2 not being released was marketing hype, it's that OpenAI themselves claiming it's too dangerous to release specifically, implying it's close to AGI, (or something like that), was marketing hype.

[refulgentis]

That may sound more defensible to you, but its even more detached from reality. I feel very old right now because I actually read the thing at the time, but setting that aside, do you really think anyone thought or said GPT-2 was AGI?

I don't think you do.

I only mention reading it because that would clear it up, and you seem interested, and your parenthetical indicates A) you're aware you're claiming something a bit silly and B) you don't know what was actually said.

[Matl]

> do you really think anyone thought or said GPT-2 was AGI?

> I don't think you do.

I don't think they did. I think the marketing around it was such as to imply to the general public that it's not that far from AGI/let their imagination run wild, because it's useful marketing.

Same way as Apple's marketing around the iPad was that it's the 'Super. (full stop) (space) Computer. (full stop)' They never say it's any kind of a 'supercomputer'. But they know how that is going to be interpreted by many. It's intentional marketing.

Same with OpenAI.

I do think you're playing obtuse at this point, if you don't get that.

[refulgentis]

I am not playing obtuse, and note “do you really think” is different from accusing someone of playing a character on purpose to gaslight you, especially when the “do you really think they said” is stapled to a long, kind, explication that your parenthetical says straight out you don’t know what was said, you’re guessing.

Your attempt to recount GPT-2 and what was said about it won’t make any sense to anyone who was present at the time, and you’ve circled back to root, “marketing”, again, for a company that was selling nothing and wouldn’t for years and wasn’t raising and wasn’t even mentioning AGI in connection with GPT2. It was just a text generator back then, though a curious one worth noting. It’s genuinely awe inspiring to see someone arguing gpt-2 was near AGI and that anyone at the time thought so or said so.

It’s not worth engaging further, especially with you starting to get nasty and project what’s in my head. Have a good day.