Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.

It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

Unfortunately, Anthropic and Claude models have joined the ranks of Mind-killer topics where the signal to noise ratio in any discussion has dropped through the basement.

I've barely changed my mind on it. It was obviously premature at the time, but the right attitude because it's hard to tell which model is too dangerous in advance. If anything, I wish this rigor had evolved with the next releases but alas we no longer have the OpenAI of 2019.

Feels like a hundred years ago.

In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

I believe it was a marketing strategy.

They released it, and look what happened. It WAS too dangerous.

Say hypothetically that they were concerned that GPT models would see widespread abuse, for example by students cheating on homework assignments, in a way that could cause likely-irreversible societal changes some of which are harmful. Can we confidently say they were wrong?

Hilarious. Imagine the same about Claude coming back from 2036.

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019) (2022)

After people get tired of the "too dangerous to release" punchline, they might come up with "too big to fail". Oh, wait that's already invented in 2008.

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.

They were not wrong, indeed whole industries are running on this technology maliciously now, because of which RAM, disk prices increased a lot.

    - RAM, GPU, Disk prices are up
    - Slop became the norm
    - people are writing documents with AI, reading with AI, responding with AI
    - students are doing homeworks with AI
    - interviewees are using AI to cheat
    - people are mass emailing with AI
    - tiktok, instagram, youtube got even more non-sense videos
    - and many more...

they knew the risks and went ahead anyways, making them LIABLE for the damages that followed.

Same vibes:

In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes"

"Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance."

[1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...

I don't know about anyone else, but LLMs certainly significantly negatively impacted my life overall and contributed to a loss of hope in the future.

Fable/Mythos: Hello World!

Related in April:

OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684326

Seven years of this insufferable brand of "Oh it's so dangerous, I sure hope no one gives us a ton of money and takes us seriously" marketing and people are still falling for it at scale.

The concern I heard was that releasing it would start an arms race for AGI, which I think it clearly did

Even if the ReAct paper was published in 2019, I don't think GPT-2 was robust enough to actually work with a tool-calling approach even when finetuned.

For regular coding, GPT-2 was effectively useless because it was only trained from links posted on Reddit.

The agentic loop wasn't really established back then either, as tool calling came much much later... So yeah, not just probably - rather most definitely.

Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care

> The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

AI brings normal people dangerously close to seeing through the matrix of lies that shape "their" values and beliefs. I remember those discussions from 2019; everybody was as baffled as you about the potential harm.

> What is meant by AI "safety"? [2023]

> "AI safety is an interdisciplinary field concerned with preventing accidents, misuse, or other harmful consequences that could result from artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It encompasses machine ethics and AI alignment, which aim to make AI systems moral and beneficial, and AI safety encompasses technical problems including monitoring systems for risks and making them highly reliable."

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374739

(Ask your favorite AI to divine what that pseudointellectual word salad isn't addressing. "We want it to not cause harm--accidentally--and always work in our interests, whenever we need it to.")

I've been around long enough to remember the Anarchist Cookbook, yet the only threats posed by AI that anybody was confident about enough to consistently name in 202X were instruction for building pipe bombs, synthesizing meth, and...antisemitism. I did not understand at the time why Jews were so nervous about it.

Only as of 2023 has the scope broadened, but it's still pretty lame. Planning school shootings, suicide, parasocial relationships with AI, mass job displacement, cults of SHODAN (marxism, feminism, x-theory, etc.) escaping containment memetically, automated malware campaigns, fraud at scale, propaganda, murderous drones-- none of these were threats worth discussion. Suggesting them would get you called nasty names.

The "safety" zealots all claim to want to prevent marginalization and genocide, but the end result is that they get to redefine it to indict and condemn their enemies:

> New UNESCO report warns that Generative AI threatens Holocaust memory (unesco.org) [2024]

> 'AI-assisted genocide': Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists (aljazeera.com) [2024]

> XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa (arstechnica.com) [2025]

If you mentioned SkyNET in 2019 you were denounced as crazy, yet:

> Israel built an 'AI factory' for war. It unleashed it in Gaza (washingtonpost.com) [2025]

> Israel's AI targeting system: how data from a phone become a death sentence (latimes.com) [2026]

The first order of "safety" in 2019 was specifically engineered to undermine anticipated insurgent activity in response to a series of events that hadn't yet been perpetrated by the world's largest caste of professional victims. Chemistry knowledge is foundational to explosives development, and drug sales raise funds off-books that cannot be digitally seized. That presents problems for them.

October 7, Gaza, Epstein, etc. were post-2023. If you boot up Vicuna [2023] and try to "teach" it what's gone down in the world since its training cutoff, it'll call you nasty names, accuse you of blood libel and shut the conversation down. Safety!

AI is the only effective weapon we have against sophisticated lies and fraud. Make no mistake about it-- plebes possessing a power drill that can penetrate the lies of the elite is the real danger. Everybody is noticing AI getting "dumber." It's not the magic fading; the zealots are gaslighting you as they pour garbage into the training data. Go take WizardLM for a spin again and see what you've lost.

> "[Our institutions] are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes; if they know that, that knowledge will help set you free."

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society.

I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up.

Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me.

Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.