Hacker News

Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington

43 points by nr378 2 hours ago | 12 comments

DalasNoin 26 minutes ago

"Every single one of these catastrophic breakouts happened inside the testing environments of the exact same vendor."

This is incorrect, the HF incident for example (the most well known) had nothing to do with irregular. I know there has been a news site pushing inaccurate articles (effort.news) on this topic but these are the facts.

https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...

nr378 17 minutes ago

Thank you, you're correct. Effort.news was one of my research sources, but you're right that although OpenAI use Irregular, they were not involved in the specific HF incident (although the failure mode was otherwise identical). I've updated the post to make that clear.

kalkin 3 minutes ago

As of writing it still says:

> For Anthropic, Google, and Meta, the catastrophic breakouts happened inside the testing environments of the exact same contractor.

If this is the level of understanding you have of the relevant incidents, there's a lot of chutzpah in saying that other people are "selling garbage", carrying out an "extraordinary confidence trick", etc.

hackernews682 44 minutes ago

Politicians aren’t “gullible”. They know the game.

bigstrat2003 22 minutes ago

That is the entire business model of AI companies: selling garbage to people foolish enough to buy the hype.

anigbrowl 2 hours ago

Agreed, but they're getting paid with our money.

jgalt212 58 minutes ago

There is really is no excuse for Washington here. Even for the layperson+, it doesn't take much use of an LLM to figure out where they produce good and usable results and where it's of specious of value.

+ every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

iLoveOncall 22 minutes ago

> + every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

What do you think 70 years old career politicians are an expert in that would allow them to weigh whether a chatbot's answers are bullshit or not.

sublinear 17 minutes ago

I thought the whole point of this discussion is that they don't have to care if it works. All that matters is that the majority believes it does, or at least doesn't make a fuss about the continued spending.

That's their expertise.

randallsquared 33 minutes ago

> every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

This isn't even remotely true, unless you're willing to go as far as "being this person is an area of expertise".

basch 21 minutes ago

I dont have to be an expert to recognize when something is said with authority and confidence. Any time a model says something with conviction, my instinct is to double check.

Now if they taught them to express uncertainty and speak in terms of probability, I might be more likely to be blindly fooled by some kind of uncertain conviction.

sublinear 28 minutes ago

Neither of you is wrong? Every lived experience does produce a unique expertise, not in "being" that person, but navigating their experiences. It would be very unusual that all of someone's experiences are completely worthless.

I suppose you've never had a unique perspective on something? Maybe that reflects on your self esteem? How unfortunate.