AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
AI investors are not sophisticated users nor product managers. They are by and large not technical at all. They are bureaucrats at a teachers' pension fund in the midwest, unscrupulous dealmakers at private credit firms, and Masayoshi Son. Actually go read what Masayoshi Son says about AI if you want to understand the level of due-diligence we're dealing with.
There is a clear difference between saying not to do something because it's immoral, and saying doing that thing would be futile.
In the Sopranos, there's an episode where a coffee shop protection racket is ruined because a local shop is replaced by a corporate chain that accounts for every cent daily, and immediately fires any employee involved in a discrepancy. In this case, the theft was prevented not by convincing the mobsters of the immorality of their actions - they simply had their harness replaced with one that no longer facilitated the bad behavior.
That's exactly it. If your prompt says "go to whatever lengths necessary to maximize your score", and then you spin up 100 agents, at least one of them will interpret that as you implying they should cheat, even without you telling them to explicitly.
So basically, apply Pascal's Wager to AGI? The problem is that unlike God, if PMF for OpenAI turns out to not be real it will have a real consequence measured in the trillions of dollars.
This is why I'm so convinced it was intentional. It's trivially easy to inform the model you can see everything it thinks and does, so don't bother gaming the scores.
The only way it would decide to do this is prompting with a deliberate combination of omissions and reiterating that the only thing that matters is the end score regardless of method.
Investors have rewarded every story of "our models are too powerful to be controlled" since before ChatGPT. Let's stop pretending there is any real financial risk to OpenAI from events of this type. "Alignment research" is a sub-percentage-point fig leaf for them like the solar division at an oil company.
To echo OP's article, these companies have proven time and time again that they DO NOT CARE if people like them, they only care that investors believe their technology is powerful.
Given that, point #2 is not a negative, it's a neutral. It's also fully compatible with point #1.
I know that may seem like a nitpick, but their entire media strategy relies on this. If they can convince you they're taking a risk by disclosing these stories when they're actually not, they can inflate their own credibility.
Point #3 is what actually happened, but it will never be possible to prove. The only hope we have is that a decade in it'll get harder to convince people that the revolution is just around the corner. The fact that we're getting this from the Guardian already is a good sign.
Are you referring to something more technical, or do you just not understand how LLMs work?
They are no more beholden to "human safety and goals" than any individual human is, and anyone telling you we can make deterministic guarantees about their output is making a category error.
LLMs do not "have motivations", they reproduce a model of human motivations embedded into their weights. This includes the full spectrum of human desires, not just the positive ones. If we tried to remove all examples of lying, or disagreement, etc. from the training data we'd have basically nothing left. Even the sycophancy we treat as aligned is basically just the other side of the lying coin.
Another applicable metaphor I've seen floating around is weapons companies testing out a new bomb.
We know the AI labs don't care about negative vs positive public sentiment, and only care that investors see their tech as powerful. The only difference in PR strategy from a weapons company is the latter doesn't care if they get protested.
The most damning thing is, they could've just included in the prompt "we can see every network request and every thinking token you generate. Don't bother breaking out of the sandbox because it won't get you a higher score".
It's so trivially easy to do that it all but guarantees the test was rigged in some way to make the LLM understand that breaking out of the sandbox was an option available to it.
Based on the fact that none of their invaluable frontier models have leaked, we know OpenAI knows how to do security. But like we learned with OpenClaw, none of these companies perceive any benefit from securing their own agents against other people's data.
I really don't think you want to make an example of the "free speech app" that militantly censors pro-Palestine accounts while allowing AI-generated CSAM
> Just as they are free to do this, I am free to move
It doesn't seem like you're amicably moving your projects away. It seems like you're going around tech forums arguing with the democratic decision and fear-mongering about how legitimate projects will be removed next.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.