If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to.
Haven't all the labs effectively disbanded their real safety teams a while ago?
To be honest, I don't really follow it closely because I'm pretty certain whatever they say on the matter, collectively we're going to "yolo" this entire thing for economic and political reasons, so I'm just basing this on strings of headlines I've seen on places like HN, etc.
Neither Anthropic nor Deepmind have. Meanwhile, the rocket company that somehow makes most of their revenue from renting out data centres never had much to dismantle.
There are several papers out there arguing that chain-of-reasoning-like output is performative, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05488
It would be awesome if we could reasonably purge all anthropomorphizing language like “tried” or “thought” entirely from AI discussions, because it introduces very sneaky biases in our thinking, but I’ve found it damn hard to do in practice.
And the reality is so banal, a useful tool that you nonetheless have to handhold like a schizophrenic on a bad day, checking all of their outputs. Not a bad tool within limits, but it sure isn't going to be racking up trillions in the time-frame it has to for this scheme to pay off.
Then again everyone seems to be rushing to IPO so I guess once the bag-holders are found the rest ceases to matter.
And the reason it is receiving so much attention is because not only is the technology being developed behaving in unanticipated ways that are very much not tool-like, but OpenAI is being completely reckless and not monitoring internal agent actions.
What would convince you that it is not a ploy for investment? What if the ongoing investigation by the coalition of state attorneys general were to prosecute the firm, or beyond that, it was shut down or broken up after enough popular backlash?
A sea change, visible to all, much like the many externalities of this business are. Profit commensurate to investment.
You know… juice worth the appalling squeeze we’re all being forced to endure.