sohois
1d ago
The problem with the weak argument is that it is, well, weak. It demonstrates nothing, particularly given we can already assume that every corporate communication ever made is being spun to portray the corp in a more positive light.
Indeed, we actually know one of the methods that OpenAI used to try and spin the METR evaluation more positively: they heavily restricted the scope to prevent any of the details of the German wiki collusion coming to light. Which also raises the other critical weakness of the marketing argument, in that many of the recent safety scandals have come to light from third party sources. METR, the UK's AISI, and a couple of independent researchers for the collusion stuff. Now, given METR's links with the wider AI ecosystem, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that they could have been influenced to present things in a certain way and thus aren't fully independent, but it would be a much larger leap to suggest this of a UK gov organisation, and an impossible leap to suggest that of a couple of randos.
sohois
1d ago
The "it's all just marketing" people need to reckon with the fact that they were rushing to declare the same thing over the Hugging Face incidents, only for the German wiki revelations to completely destroy that argument.
That was a different company obviously, and it doesn't preclude future incidents from being leaked for marketing purposes, but it should still lead to a serious adjustment in beliefs on what is and isn't marketing
I'm not sure what was vague about the above post, unless you have an aversion to clicking on links? The case itself is pretty lengthy and not something easily summarizable in a few sentences.
As for how it destroys the argument: marketing depends on having some control of the narrative. As I said in another post, even though there were so many third parties involved in these reports, you could kind of make a case that somehow OpenAI (or Anthropic in their cases) is still directing what is being said.
But in this case, the revelations were completely out of the control of OpenAi, and they actively took steps to hide this information, even going so far as to mislead congress when asked about events like this.
And unlike the example of solving of Navier-stokes, this was a largely identical issue to the HuggingFace incident. So we now have clear proof that agents were escaping OpenAI's controls, gaining internet access, and forming secret communities to collaborate on cheating. And all of this was deliberately hidden by OpenAI and only found out by completely independent researchers. Thus, any marketing argument has to reconcile the fact that they went out of their way to hide incidents despite the fact that they are apparently using this evidence to boost their stock price or whatever.
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