> 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?
There is no model going rogue. There are models that are prompted "do whatever needs to be done to get X", and given a set of tools and virtually infinite computing power. Then they play surprised when the model breaks out of a flimsy containment (as it was ordered to), with barely any logging, and "do whatever to get X". OpenAI said they intentionally lowered the safety measures for the "ExploitGym" test that lead to HuggingFace attack, and they used the same postmortem to praise their own model capabilities (https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur...), is not that they are concealing it.
If any of us did a tenth of what they did, we would be already in jail.
maybe the point is to show that models are capable of x, y, and z and when the time comes you want them on your side.
There are two side of the coin. Like with sociopath - they have utility if you think you can control/motivate them.
I'm probably losing it, but just based on OpenAI's behavior and public communications, it seems to me they want to be taken over by the government?
Maybe Sam Altman is getting worried that they've raised more than $150 billion and still have net losses and thinks of it as the only exit? I don't know, but someone else provide an alternative explanation as to why a company would work so hard to turn the public against AI.