[jrflo]

It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

[minimaxir]

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.

[ffsm8]

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.

[a2128]

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

[suburban_strike]

> 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."