OpenAI delays launch of open-weight model

Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going to die if a LLM gives an output that its creators do not like, yet when they say “safety tests”, they mean that they are checking to what extent the LLM will say things they do not like.

An LLM can trivially instruct someone to take medications with adverse interactions, steer a mental health crisis toward suicide, or make a compelling case that a particular ethnic group is the cause of your society's biggest problem so they should be eliminated. Words can't kill people, but words can definitely lead to deaths.

That's not even considering tool use!

Yes, and a table saw can take your hand. As can a whole variety of power tools. That does not render them illegal to sell to adults.

An interesting comparison.

Table saws sold all over the world are inspected and certified by trusted third parties to ensure they operate safely. They are illegal to sell without the approval seal.

Moreover, table saws sold in the United States & EU (at least) have at least 3 safety features (riving knife, blade guard, antikickback device) designed to prevent personal injury while operating the machine. They are illegal to sell without these features.

Then of course there are additional devices like sawstop, but it is not mandatory yet as far as I'm aware. Should be in a few years though.

LLMs have none of those board labels or safety features, so I'm not sure what your point was exactly?

They are somewhat self regulated, as they can cause permament damage to the company that releases them, and they are meant for general consumers without any training, unlike table saws that are meant for trained people.

An example is the first Microsoft bot that started to go extreme rightwing when people realized how to make it go that direction. Grok had a similar issue recently.

Google had racial issues with its image generation (and earlier with image detection). Again something that people don't forget.

Also an OpenAI 4o release was encouraging stupid things to people when they asked stupid questions and they just had to roll it back recently.

Of course I'm not saying that that's the real reason (somehow they never say that the problem is with performance for not releasing stuff), but safety matters with consumer products.