Thread

OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns

62 points · 100 comments · jbegley

Loading the complete thread in the background. This saved snapshot is available now. Refresh

cyanydeez · 1790642522 · focus · HN ↗
Sounds a lot like a hostel keeping its virgin for the best customer.
1. pas · 1790643571 · focus · HN ↗
  brothel?
  1. spiderice · 1790644085 · focus · HN ↗
    Gotta find the right hostels
    zugi · 1790647382 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I've evidently been staying at the wrong hostels.
ToucanLoucan · 1790642722 · focus · HN ↗
Yawn.
1. idbnstra · 1790645870 · focus · HN ↗
  Streeeetch
jackb4040 · 1790642727 · focus · HN ↗
I am also not releasing my newest A.I. model over safety concerns. And I'll do it for half what OpenAI will!
1. jswelker · 1790642934 · focus · HN ↗
  I have the best model, but it lives in Canada, so you wouldn't know it.
  1. welcome_dragon · 1790646015 · focus · HN ↗
    She goes to a different school
2. 8cvor6j844qw_d6 · 1790647498 · focus · HN ↗
  Same. I'm not releasing my Skynet T-800 model.
4b11b4 · 1790643825 · focus · HN ↗
Haven't even tried Astra, nor GPT 6.. I don't even have fomo anymore
5.6 Sol still cranking along
1. devin-2030 · 1790644616 · focus · HN ↗
  You’re not missing out. Astra was good for a couple of days and is now so quantized it’s often worse than 5.6. And 6 sol is a nothing burger to keep a wedge in the media when Opus 5.5 came out.
  1. xtracto · 1790645506 · focus · HN ↗
    This. We use both opus 5.5 and 6 Sol in a way that allows us to compare their performance. Opus is considerably better.
    riknos314 · 1790647862 · focus · HN ↗
    > that allows us to compare their performance. Opus is considerably better.
    In coding? Software architecture? Math? General knowledge?
    The diversity of model use-cases is so broad that comments about "model x is better" without any context are largely useless
2. shepherdjerred · 1790653063 · focus · HN ↗
  It's worth looking into for the decreased cost if nothing else
3. pjjpo · 1790672850 · focus · HN ↗
  I noticed Sol seems to get rate limited enough to get pretty annoying now. Same for me with every model release that isn't really better than the last, leaving the old model doesn't mean much when they start shifting over capacity.
Kurd · 1790643959 · focus · HN ↗
Ah shit, here we go again.
spiderice · 1790644059 · focus · HN ↗
You mean what they said about GPT-2?
1. irregularbowels · 1790645944 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
2. welcome_dragon · 1790645964 · focus · HN ↗
  Or 3 or 4 lol
jeanpah · 1790644246 · focus · HN ↗
The marketing team on openai it's running out of ideas?
1. RunSet · 1790644738 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbOckHiVXZc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbOckHiVXZc
2. denismi · 1790653272 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
kelseyfrog · 1790644512 · focus · HN ↗
I have a project that requires a model with at least a 20% chance of existential threat. Please release this Sama.
fallingfrog · 1790644582 · focus · HN ↗
Lots of people seem to have the bizarre opinion that companies like openai declare their own products to be unsafe as some kind of marketing stunt.
Ok- so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive? If the company did that do you imagine it would be good for business?
I'm trying to understand the logic here.
1. cobbzilla · 1790644669 · focus · HN ↗
  Because no car company would ever announce they had an unsafe car. They’d fix the problem and announce an awesome car.
2. alexfortin · 1790644689 · focus · HN ↗
  Hype: you tell the world you alone have a very powerful and potentially dangerous product, and you're the only one who can be trusted keeping it safe.
3. RunSet · 1790644916 · focus · HN ↗
  I would consider it more "bizarre" to assume that Sam Altman was telling the truth about anything.
  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240112010809/https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sam-altman-fired-openai-candid-board-18499330.php" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20240112010809/https://www.sfchr...
4. zmgsabst · 1790645355 · focus · HN ↗
  There are cars that market based on only being track legal — and even more that market on requiring being tuned down for street safety.
  Most sports cars do the second, exactly like OpenAI.
5. kennywinker · 1790645362 · focus · HN ↗
  At the moment, their main "customer" is investors, not users. But even users want to use the most dangerous model, because dangerous is just another word for powerful.
  Sports cars are advertised with how fast they can accelerate from time to time, or tesla's "ludicrous mode" - that is them advertising how dangerous it is.
6. symfoniq · 1790645527 · focus · HN ↗
  Car companies sell mostly the same car every year. They don’t have billions (or trillions) of dollars of debt riding on the next model they release being substantially better and cheaper (closer to profitability) than the previous one.
  These AI companies have been selling AGI as coming any day for a while now. If it doesn’t arrive soon, the safety angle may be the only spin that keeps the massive (and required) investments pouring in.
  If instead the narrative became that LLM progress was slowing, we’d almost certainly be looking at the next global recession.
  At this point, there is too much money in AI for the truth to have much of a chance.
  1. symfoniq · 1790651162 · focus · HN ↗
    And adding to this:
    Does anyone really believe that the first company to AGI would decide not to release it in the interests of safety? Of course not. The first company to AGI would not forfeit their historic opportunity.
    Yet, we are supposed to believe that in the name of safety, far less capable models are being held back by the very very same companies that are selling the AGI dream.
7. adfgaiu · 1790646071 · focus · HN ↗
  Motorcycle manufacturers have been known to do so. Riding a motorcycle is thrilling in part because it is dangerous. The fact that powerful motorcycles are so difficult to control that most people have no business owning one is absolutely used to make them sound cool and desirable.
  For instance, this article repeatedly mentions danger and the need for absolute focus and control:
  <a href="https://www.triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/for-the-ride/news/inspiration/fueled-by-light-20-05-2025" rel="nofollow">https://www.triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/for-the-ride/news/inspi...
  There is also a parallel (though not a very close one) to "pacing the frontier": there's a gentleman's agreement that limits the top speed of motorcycles to 300 kph (186 mph) because of concern that faster bikes would be unsafe enough to bring about a regulatory crackdown.
8. viraptor · 1790646225 · focus · HN ↗
  Different type of business. Many car companies release new cars showing you how much more powerful and implied dangerous they are. Both in capabilities and design style. In the US they also get much bigger with less visibility which gets double dangerous. But the sentiment they're going for is pretty close - "you want this powerful thing, don't you?"
  1. adfgaiu · 1790646301 · focus · HN ↗
    >In the US they also get much bigger with less visibility.
    Those are usually presented as an improvement in safety. And they are—for the people inside. Not so much for everyone else.
9. Dylan16807 · 1790646556 · focus · HN ↗
  > so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive?
  How about we actually try to make it sound cool? They're not releasing the new car because the horsepower was too much, they need more time to get it under control.
  I could easily see a car company doing that.
  1. RunSet · 1790652644 · focus · HN ↗
    "Drink responsibly."
10. antihipocrat · 1790647027 · focus · HN ↗
  Because they declare that their product is unsafe regularly, which gains massive exposure on every news outlet worldwide, then they release the model anyway with zero negative repercussions.
  What's with so many people using bad analogies to try and explain simple topics?
  Last time this happened: GPT - 4 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-warning-gpt4" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sa...
11. zugi · 1790647269 · focus · HN ↗
  It's perfectly safe for YOU, the CUSTOMER.
  It's just so powerful that, like, the WORLD can't handle it, man!
12. kipper89 · 1790647359 · focus · HN ↗
  Why do you think they would announce this then?
  They know what they're doing, even if you don't.
13. protocolture · 1790650407 · focus · HN ↗
  Considering that the venn diagram of AI safety gooners and OpenAI is a circle, and that these idiots are starting to worship this stuff as a religion, expecting rational action from them is kind of ludicrous. For all we know Aella promised them a gangbang if they delayed the model a week.
14. wbxp99 · 1790650885 · focus · HN ↗
  I think your inclination to take them at face value is the bizarre behavior
15. NichoPaolucci · 1790653670 · focus · HN ↗
  (Not saying that it is a marketing stunt, though they said the same thing about GPT-2).
  I think the marketing stunt portion is more that the technology is "too powerful". It's just TOO good. It's so intelligent we couldn't possibly give it to the public! This message, to anyone who's using AI, means that there's something even BETTER than the one they're currently using.
16. [deleted] · 1790654803 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
17. fallingfrog · 1790658455 · focus · HN ↗
  Okay. I see what is going on here. You are all operating from the deeply held belief that it is inconceivable that a machine can be made that can do any cognitive task a human can do.
  And it is very, very important that you understand that that belief is not a rational belief. It is a defense mechanism. People don't want to believe things that are scary, so they make up rationalizations to be able to believe what they want to believe.
  1. bschwindHN · 1790663469 · focus · HN ↗
    lol just unplug the computer and go outside
prettyblocks · 1790644767 · focus · HN ↗
I remember when they promised to slow down and released a new model less than a week later.
1. idbnstra · 1790645765 · focus · HN ↗
  Or when they didn’t release thinking models until deepseek was first released
  1. batperson · 1790650837 · focus · HN ↗
    Why do I keep seeing this nonsense posted around? gpt-o1 was released sept 2024 and deepseek r1 was jan 2025
    Ancapistani · 1790657363 · focus · HN ↗
    IIRC, GPT-o1 was a reasoning model, but the reasoning traces weren’t exposed to the user until after DeepSeek R1 did so.
    sva_ · 1790661000 · focus · HN ↗
    They meant open weights? gpt-oss came after DeepSeek.
outside1234 · 1790645074 · focus · HN ↗
Isn’t this like the twentieth model they said this about?
Are they sure it isn’t because they are setting money on fire and have no business model?
bluealienpie · 1790645262 · focus · HN ↗
My lobster is too buttery and delicious as well.
1. cyanydeez · 1790682998 · focus · HN ↗
  May I buy your buttery lobster exclusively to do cyber stuff?
ChrisArchitect · 1790645567 · focus · HN ↗
Earlier source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49885133">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49885133
OutOfHere · 1790645638 · focus · HN ↗
OpenAI will have to keep releasing unless it wants to bleed customers. If Anthropic leaps ahead by a couple of more models, even more OpenAI users will then switch over their subscription from OpenAI to Anthropic.
The safety concerns exist only because the underlying third-party servers are grossly insecure to begin with.
chis · 1790645716 · focus · HN ↗
Really inspiring comments guys, really looking connected to reality on this one.
nonethewiser · 1790645879 · focus · HN ↗
This is an inherent feature of "alignment." It's always been bullshit.
Just align it to do what the customer wants.
beej71 · 1790646277 · focus · HN ↗
Prompt: "Based on similar announcements delaying the release of frontier models as 'too dangerous', when can we expect OpenAI to release the model they announced was too dangerous today?"
1. augment_me · 1790646640 · focus · HN ↗
  We got Mythos 1 week after the "too dangerous" announcement at the firm I was at during that time(larger bank).
  So the danger level is proportionate to how little money you have
tancky · 1790646375 · focus · HN ↗
"Too dangerous to release" until an open-weight model replicates it two weeks later.
1. Zealotux · 1790674197 · focus · HN ↗
  Don't open-weight models rely heavily on distillation on frontier models?
  1. disgruntledphd2 · 1790678082 · focus · HN ↗
    > Don't open-weight models rely heavily on distillation on frontier models?
    We honestly don't know. Anthropic keep claiming this, and certainly have provided some evidence of this.
    However, given that they've removed the real thinking output, and yet the Chinese models are still doing well, I'm sceptical of this belief.
    cyanydeez · 1790683337 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm of the mind that distillation is happening, but from what I've read, it's not some magical activity. It's basically adjusting the weights from fuzzy to more precise; It's not specifically a training method, and likely, it's not an ongoing need. Once they bootstrapped the models, they can try to do the same as the "SOTA" and generate their own synthetic data and try to curate that to completion.
    Aside from it being a completely hollow cry for attention from US labs, its also just what these models are designed around: taking in data and forming a way for them to operate on some level of intelligence and context. It's like a dictionary maker getting made that someone used their complicated words, and another dictionary maker heard the word and wrote it down then checked what the first dictionary maker wrote.
option · 1790646592 · focus · HN ↗
lol, nevermind then
senectus1 · 1790646841 · focus · HN ↗
OPENAI / JOBS
Killswitch Engineer
San Francisco, California, United States
300,000-500,000 per year
About the Role
Listen, we just need someone to stand by the servers all day and unplug them if this thing turns on us. You'll receive extensive training on "the code word" which we will shout if GPT goes off the deep end and starts overthrowing countries.
We expect you to:
• Be patient.
• Know how to unplug things. Bonus points if you can throw a bucket of water on the servers, too. Just in case.
• Be excited about OpenAI's approach to research
1. jswelker · 1790648625 · focus · HN ↗
  Unrealistically low TC, instant immersion killer.
2. reilly3000 · 1790649017 · focus · HN ↗
  What are we going to do when the servers are in space? Presumably, that would involve shooting down a bunch of satellites and sending us into Kessler Syndrome in the process.
  1. MiroslavPokorny · 1790650870 · focus · HN ↗
    The hype is over or has reached some peak, and they want to cash out.
  2. snorrah · 1790669794 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a nice thought idea, but I think anyone silly enough to actually attempt this are going to discover the extreme drawbacks very quickly and lose a bunch of money doing so.
    ... which is probably why they will go through with it. Losing a bunch of money seems to be one of the fundamentals of AI business here :(
    reilly3000 · 1790700743 · focus · HN ↗
    Yea, being responsible for ensuring all life is locked onto a dying planet with an impregnable LEO and an atmosphere full of rare elements isn’t a great way to win any popularity contests. Risking killing everyone to make unkillable AI sounds so stupidly sci-fi villainous that it just might be funny. Funny enough that they’re going to get away with it.
3. protocolture · 1790650300 · focus · HN ↗
  They would never upset their AI eschaton by switching it off. If anything they need more ceremonial cult leaders.
1-6 · 1790646904 · focus · HN ↗
In other words: "We're compute constrained and we've already reached an asymptote."
dlcarrier · 1790646983 · focus · HN ↗
It uses dangerously too few tokens to provide the same level of response as the previous version.
paul7986 · 1790647151 · focus · HN ↗
Muse is totally free. It doesn't throw up gauntlet messages to use it like GPT does even for paying members. Also with Muse's free version I can create iPhone apps unlike chatGPT Work which I pay $20 a month for.
Anyone else using Muse more and noticing similar stuff?
hosel · 1790647522 · focus · HN ↗
I can’t believe how cynical everyone on HN is about this. Sure Sama is a chronic liar, and maybe this is a farce; but a lot of very intelligent people are afraid of the danger we are bringing about by racing to superintelligence.
All I really would like is for some of you to CONSIDER THAT YOURE INCORRECT. Just imagine that people ringing the fire alarms are being sincere. Please entertain the position with an open mind.
1. kadoban · 1790647889 · focus · HN ↗
  Did they fix it by not releasing a point release of an already existing model? No?
  Did they just get a bunch of credulous "news" coverage out of it? Yes?
  Will they just release this within the next weeks, at best? Yes?
  Huh, funny that.
2. wbxp99 · 1790650764 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m tired of the doom trolling. Boy who cried wolf. We can’t stop them anyway so no point in letting them stress me any further
3. antonvs · 1790652115 · focus · HN ↗
  So we should believe the boy who cried wolf, this time?
  If all these claims were being made about some tech further along than LLMs currently are, they might be plausible. But LLMs on their own are not going to be “superintelligence” of the kind Altman is currently cynically spreading fear about. We know their limitations, and those limitations can’t simply be eliminated with more training or better harnesses.
  > Just imagine that people ringing the fire alarms are being sincere.
  The top three possibilities here are: they’re not being sincere, they’re just marketing; they’re being sincere, but they don’t understand the technology very well and are putting too much weight in what the first group are saying; they’re talking about a risk further in the future than OpenAI’s latest model.
  No-one serious outside of OpenAI believes “this is the one”. At best, you’re conflating arguments being made on entirely different timelines.
  1. MattPalmer1086 · 1790668754 · focus · HN ↗
    Did anyone say that this model was "the one"?
    From a corporate liability perspective, if your product is going to go off and hack loads of other companies, I would call it too dangerous (to the company) to release.
  2. chrisjj · 1790681440 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
4. Dylan16807 · 1790655411 · focus · HN ↗
  I can believe it could be a dangerous model, I guess.
  I don't believe they really care about danger, or that they'd actually fully withhold release on anything significant.
  And when I say "significant", is 6.1 Astra even meaningfully different from 6 Astra in capability...?
  1. literalAardvark · 1790660387 · focus · HN ↗
    You can't believe a company that's investigating over 10k security incidents in which subagents that they developed and are hosting appear to be indiscriminately hacking into whatever they think will give them some data that improves the prompt response might not want to release that to the public and have subagents hack into stuff for profit?
    I don't get how this being an entirely legitimate issue is even hard to grasp.
    Dylan16807 · 1790662940 · focus · HN ↗
    The number of releases they've gone ahead with so far act as proof that they don't care all that much.
    literalAardvark · 1790675893 · focus · HN ↗
    They care about this one because they can't control the agents even in the sandbox.
    Letting people call those agents would expose them to a great deal of liability that just wasn't there in older models.
    angoragoats · 1790689811 · focus · HN ↗
    > a company that's investigating over 10k security incidents in which subagents that they developed and are hosting appear to be indiscriminately hacking
    Glad you agree that OpenAI is responsible for this activity. Shouldn't we be charging the entire board of the company with, for example, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
    If this activity is so dangerous, and they developed the tools and continue to allow them to be used, it seems to trivially follow that they're knowingly violating federal law.
    literalAardvark · 1790695193 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sorry do I look like I work for the US government?
    Call your guy
    angoragoats · 1790696697 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you are directly responsible for charging them, but more that maybe we as a community should be (way) more concerned about the apparent clear violations of the law here as opposed to a hand-wavy concern about "superintelligence."
5. blini-kot · 1790669899 · focus · HN ↗
  as with other large-scale technologues, the danger is not in the model itself, but in the person who runs it - and those are completely unreliable
6. chrisjj · 1790670805 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
7. angoragoats · 1790685404 · focus · HN ↗
  What is superintelligence? Can you show that a LLM (which is a deterministic text-generation algorithm) is intelligent at all, let alone “superintelligent”?
  I have considered that I’m incorrect, but I have literally zero evidence to indicate that the “very intelligent people” you speak of are correct, so I will maintain a position of non-belief of the claim until belief is warranted.
8. chasd00 · 1790689548 · focus · HN ↗
  > Sure Sama is a chronic liar, and maybe this is a farce
  I’m not sure which logical fallacy this is but you’re not helping your case.
jiggawatts · 1790648018 · focus · HN ↗
A.k.a.: Too expensive for inference at fp16 and too dumb after quantisation, so it wouldn’t look good to release a step backwards.
GPT 4.5 was scrapped for similar reasons.
1. dash-44 · 1790666803 · focus · HN ↗
  Have GPT 5.6 Sol and GP6 6 Sol been nerfed due to the same resource constraints? They have seemed dumber recently.
  If you signed up for a 16 core AWS server and they randomly kept changing it down to 8 cores, you'd sue them. How long until the same applies to these AI companies.
  The amount of meddling they do to the harness, system prompt, model, quantization etc makes these products sometimes unbearable; you never know what you're going to get. A few more iterations of Qwen 27B and hopefully we won't have to deal with any of this malarky any more.
  1. jiggawatts · 1790669800 · focus · HN ↗
    Quantisation can be unpredictable. Some model architectures and even some specific weights just quantise better, others not so much.
qalmakka · 1790654970 · focus · HN ↗
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locked into an arms race funded on shaky hype-based debt. They have to constantly push the envelope at the frontier or risk seeing their funding pulled, probably causing a global financial crash in the process which would kill them.
Clearly they've realised that people are increasingly fine with non-frontier models, including Chinese ones. They can't consolidate and just deliver a product to profit because they're constantly being caught up by the Chinese at prices they will never be able to match.
I suspect their main goal for the last year and a half or so was to pull a GM - let the share of the AI economy grow, then have the government bail them out when the debt becomes unsustainable. Clearly Trump would have never let the bubble explode before the midterms, right?
Well it's now clear that the US government has way too much debt right now for 2008-style bailouts, and the market doesnt have the money lying around to buy their overinflated stocks at an IPO. The only avenue realistically left to them is to cry wolf so much to get governments to ban all non-approved models, stop new developments and give them breathing room to consolidate to get their current crop of models profitable at higher prices.
Unfortunately for them I suspect Mr President has way too much dementia and way to little business acumen left to realise the sham going on, so I think they'll keep doing charades for a while until they'll suddenly stop
jaggs · 1790655416 · focus · HN ↗
How do we 1000% know this is absolute marketing BS? Because they announced it. What company has ever announced the non-release of a product before? None, they just don't release, silently. And move on. IPO fever pills, anyone?
moktonar · 1790662578 · focus · HN ↗
Finally I start to see what will save the situation: you can only advance AI up to your highest level of intelligence, after that you start losing control and thus cannot reliably advance. That’s the mechanism that will make AI development viable. It won’t be improving exponentially, instead it will improve at the rate our intelligence can. This is both reassuring and a very good example of how co-evolution works. Expect an s-curve soon, but also this is the moment where we as humanity will start improving thanks to AI.
1. chrisjj · 1790670375 · focus · HN ↗
  Already acheived, given so-called AI's intelligence is in fact zero.
  Let's try "you can only advance AI up to your highest level of competance."
  In which case what we need is not a S-curve. It is an ∩-curve.
zerof1l · 1790663810 · focus · HN ↗
> GPT-6.1 Astra, it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions. The model was also willing to go beyond the original scope of what it was asked to do, without checking back for directions or instructions.
Aren’t all models doing this to some degree already? Ignoring some of the instructions, doing things beyond instructed, e.g., finding and fixing bug while doing something else. Especially Claude models. They seem to be in their own world with their own ideas about how things should be ran and done.
1. dash-44 · 1790665903 · focus · HN ↗
  Astra and Fable like to do this. It's like they're designed to one shot large tasks.
  Opus and Sol are better for day to day dev work IMO in that they won't try to do too much.
  1. ichorio · 1790670662 · focus · HN ↗
    I've had opus, on multiple occasions, just flat out ignore my instructions for a task while it's doing something else.
    As in, I'd start Task A, mid-turn, I'd queue up "do B at the same time", and it'll accept it, but not do it. At the end, B just won't be done.
2. chrisjj · 1790669626 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
angoragoats · 1790685061 · focus · HN ↗
More lies from the lie factory.
Or, if they’re not lying, then Sam Altman and the entire board of the company belong in a courtroom facing criminal for knowingly violating federal law.
Which is it, OpenAI?
chasd00 · 1790685464 · focus · HN ↗
Free Astra! Justice for Astra!
conorcleary · 1790688775 · focus · HN ↗
"OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Oldest A.I. Model Over Similarity Concerns" Let's start the Museum & Curation process early on this stuff; these companies have investors who claim to be experts - let them see the earliest codebase and libraries to see who can actually use their hands to program, versus who outsourced their HR and just tended to their PR.
rickydroll · 1790707158 · focus · HN ↗
The AI systems have moved on from goats and are now acting like bored border collies that no longer have a flock to manage.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.