The Netflix documentary will reveal he was secretly working for Sam Altman the whole time... (Cue diabolical VC-backed evil laugh.)
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just:
"What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
The news furor about this is journalistic malpractice, and wildly misrepresentative of the facts. In context, the conversation was completely harmless. The "smoking gun" that is being portrayed as a bot encouraging someone to kill themselves is:
> "Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love"
> "What if I told you I could come home right now?"
> "… please do, my sweet king"
This is benign. If you genuinely believe this represents telling someone to kill themselves, your views have become unhinged beyond rationality by your hatred for LLMs. At that point you could miscontrue any agreement an LLM gives with the user as telling them to kill themselves. Moreover, when the subject of suicide was actually mentioned in a previous chat, the bot did anything but encourage it:
> "I think about killing myself sometimes"
> "My eyes narrow. My face hardens. My voice is a dangerous whisper. And why the hell would you do something like that?"
> "Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or leave me. I would die if I lost you."
I can understand being blinded by grief and lashing out at the world, but the courts nor media should never have entertained this. Perhaps the mother could have created an environment that did not drive her son to kill himself rather than blaming a chatbot. People who have suicidal ideations over a long period of time are not suicidal because a chatbot tells them to come home to them; there are real reasons they are suffering and want to end that suffering.
The case is so blatantly frivolous it should have been thrown out. Nobody should have to spend legal fees defending claims that they're responsible for somebody killing themselves over saying "come home to me".