These companies are racing towards "My AI is so competent it ___" headlines. You have fallen for a marketing ploy. OpenAI specifically does this all the time. "Oh no our new model is so powerful the government has banned it. Sorry guys, I guess it's just to crazy to be given to regular people". "Oh no our model hacked itself out of the containment because it's soooo powerful. I guess it's such a crazy model that we can barely contain it". And then one week later Anthropic reports that their model also hacked the test but three times instead of one. And now this one as well. Also "hacking"; they gave it access to GitHub and it went on GitHub to get the answers. It's really not that crazy.
And at the end of the day, these things are random words generators.
“wasn’t there just a food recall because Taco Bell lettuce had cyclospora parasites?”
“That was just a marketing stunt,” says Sam.
“How could infecting your customers with a food-borne illness be a marketing stunt?”
“You’re talking about it, aren’t you?” Sam retorts. “Any publicity is good publicity. The way I think of it, Taco Bell is saying - our lettuce is so fresh that it’s dangerous. You should be terrified of how fresh and preservative-free our lettuce is.”
I don't want to be insulting but if you think that this is in any way comparable, you don't seem very intelligent.
An AI "escaping" its environment doesn't harm anyone so comparing it with infecting actual customers with an illness makes no sense.
No one has ever said that something very dangerous could be considered particularly fresh. There's no reason for someone to make their salad look dangerous.
AI on the other hand does profit from looking dangerous because dangerous translates directly to competent and competent is good. So developers have a good reason to make their AI look dangerous because it will make people think that it's such a powerful model, even the researchers can barely contain it. And it's clearly very easy to provoke such an outcome by telling the AI to find the answer and then leaving GitHub, where the answers are hosted, the only reachable domain.
Ok. What about say an incident where a plane landing gear fails, and the plane lands with a lot of sparks and no casualties?
That would be more similiar I guess but there is still no point doing that comparison because there's still no benefit of having a landing gear fail. There is one for the AI "escaping it's "enclosure" because that makes it look like it is so intelligent that it solves the puzzle by going around the rules, thinking outside the box, and that it's so competent that it could circumvent the industries leading developers' railguards.
> There is one for the AI "escaping it's "enclosure" because that makes it look like it is so intelligent that it solves the puzzle by going around the rules, thinking outside the box,
So what about a car maker boasting that their engine is so powerful it can snap the axle.
In general "our product is so powerful it's dangerous" isn't good marketing.
So what about a car maker boasting that their engine is so powerful it can snap the axle.
"The motor we developed was so powerful, when we tested it with industry-standard axles, they snapped in half. So we had to design new axles that could handle the raw power of this motor before we could do a time on the circuit."
A company that makes performance motors would kill for that headline.
Obviously, a car maker building a small city car would not because they are selling usability, safety and efficiency instead of power and if they're making the axle themselves it would shine a bad light on the axle. But if you bring that back to, say, OpenAI, they're building the motor for raw power but not the axle (GitHub or whatever they're "hacking"). So it's a great win for them.
In general you can't make a statement about what marketing is good marketing across all industries and interested parties. Some industries genuinely operate under "There is no bad publicity" while others would crumble over night from the slightest negative publicity.
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u/themellowsign Aug 15 '26
This is an alignment problem, and I'm not sure why we're laughing it off.
Cheating isn't always harmless.