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!

Part of the problem is due to the marketing of LLMs as more capable and trustworthy than they really are.

And the safety testing actually makes this worse, because it leads people to trust that LLMs are less likely to give dangerous advice, when they could still do so.

Spend 15 minutes talking to a person in their 20's about how they use ChatGPT to work through issues in their personal lives and you'll see how much they already trust the "advice" and other information produced by LLMs.

Manipulation is a genuine concern!

It's not just young people. My boss (originally a programmer) agreed with me that there's lots of problems using ChatGPT for our products and programs as it gives the wrong answers too often, but tgen 30 seconds later told me that it was apparently great at giving medical advice.

...later someone higher-up decided that it's actually great at programming as well, and so now we all believe it's incredibly useful and necessary for us to be able to do our daily work