Anthropic specifically is clearly trying to get the US government to ban open weight models for anticompetitive reasons. So making LLMs seem (or be!) dangerous aligns with their interests very well.

> the more evil stuff these agents do the more capable and impressive it makes them look

This is a silly meme. Who wants to pay for evil models that go rogue in your company infra?

It also plays excellently into their shameless regulatory capture agenda. The cybersecurity risks have a kernel of truth to them, as with any good lie. But when everything going on is aligned with extreme financial incentives, it's worthwhile to not take the news at face value.

this article specifically espouses the opposite viewpoint: "The fact that [OpenAI] cannot do clear, easy operations properly does not bode well for their capabilities in security engineering".

that this article is no.1 on HN right now shows that media could successfully use this framing when reporting on security incidents. i.e. readers will generally accept that framing and engage with the story (i.e. drive views/impressions).

so "the more evil stuff these agents do the more capable and impressive it makes them look" is not true in any deep sense. that there are perverse incentives driving the media to choose that framing instead of the framing espoused by this article is real, and probably far more perverse than you're acknowledging. i.e. "trace the money" type of perversion; just offhand I know that OpenAI has purchased at least one media outlet that reports on AI happenings: of course that outlet is going to run the "OpenAI's LLM is so powerful it escaped containment" narrative. that this effect might exist across much larger scales used to be a reasonably controversial claim: just observationally, that idea seems to be received with less skepticism with each passing year.

Talk about doing a freeze of these frontier models with China seems to focus solely on the commercial aspects. With the history of the NSA (remember Snowden) I’m sure the various spy agencies have their own AI datacenters up and running with no plans to stop.

This is not only a marketing stunt but also a supportive argument on the AI anthromorphism. AI is getting considered a sentient-being by many and this narrative is supporting it. In the meanwhile, companies I'd not name here are trying to introduce them as non-human beings with identities, and getting rid of legal liabilities. When a driverless car causes any harm, these companies wants 0% accountability as it is the "driver's fault" in this narrative.

Fine.

They can get their publicity while paying a one trillion dollar settlement.

Yoshua Bengino spells out the dangers here very well, without hyperbole (Turing Award winner, etc.):

https://yoshuabengio.org/en/blog/why-are-ai-agents-lying-che...

I'm not excited for the upcoming catastrophe(s), but it sure is hard not to relish the thought of this mantra dropping from my life.

Though I suppose it is the B in DABDA... not excited for the societal slump into the second D, much less the wave of people who have yet to leave the first D to enter A :(

there's also lazy incentives: the less effort they put into it, the more their ego says how great the agents are.

These are people playing mathematician, biologist, etc. They see big words and just assume they're meaningful.

It's just a weird techno cult at this point with a mostly functional product.

This can easily backfire tho, the vast majority of the American electorate absolutely despise these companies, their wares, their workers, and their leaders.

We're also at a time with authoritarianism is on the rise.

Not hard to see how this can impact those workers, potentially ruining their lives.

Correct and people are not weighing heavily enough this point

For technology like this the entire selling point of it is how powerful and capable it is

Humans are overwhelmingly reactionary and so if you want people to react to your extremely powerful technology then you need to create something for them to react to

I mean think about this figure made a one-to-one copy of the terminator 2 decommissioning process and spent millions on that advertising

You don’t do that if you don’t think that it’s gonna cause people to react and be like “oh wow this thing has immense capabilities”

>There are some perverse incentives here, the more evil stuff these agents do the more capable and impressive it makes them look.

Truly insane take to think the labs being concerned about AI Safety is actually a marketing ploy. Deranged stuff.