What exactly *are* you thinking here? That Microsoft expected and wanted Twitter trolls to turn Tay into a Nazi? That Google wanted a black George Washington? That people just expected LLMs to realize they're being tested on alignment and give different answers when they think they're being quizzed and by who? Do you actually believe what you're writing here?

I was involved in early RLHF (was writing a plugin for AUTOMATIC to let users rate responses to create an aggregate dataset to use for open-source post training). Worked for months on it. Never once occurred to me that it might make models obsequeous. I knew other people who were involved on RLHF. Not a single one ever suggested that it might. It was not obvious in foresight. When you start with "Models behave like X", you expect, in the future, them to behave like "Models behave like X, but just smarter", unless you deliberately try to change the behavior.

You realize that open source and the research community exists as well, correct?

I'll repeat: nobody was expecting this.

There is no grand overarching plan led by a shadowy cabal who has everything plotted out decades in advance with a high level of knowledge as to how everything will play out. Everyone is stumbling through the dark here. Visibility is only vaguely one step ahead.

When Word2Vec was written, the goal was text compression. The crazy properties of latent spaces were an entirely unexpected property.

When Transformers came out, it was intended to be translation software. That's it. But there were little hints at the end of the paper where they tried it on other tasks that suggested, hey, maybe this could be used for a lot more than just translation.

When GPT-2 came out, it was mostly an academic exercise, not really "useful" in most regards. But people, playing with it, started realizing that it could "almost" - not very reliably, low quality, etc - do a lot of different tasks. And it actually kinda could do some useful tasks, like summarization.

When ChatGPT came out, there were some thoughts about using it for simple tasks, but the fact that it could actually write, say, trivial bash scripts or subroutines with reasonable reliability led to a reaction of, whoa, maybe if we improve this, we can really open up a role for programming.

When the first agentic harnesses came out, thoughts of "vibe coding" were pretty far away (the term was only even coined in February 2025!). You'd ask for changes, and then review the diff; they'd do a good job with small projects but struggle more and more as codebase size grew and really needed to be babysit (honestly, it was kind of a hair-pulling experience, even though it did save a lot of time with certain things). But it was visible with each new release that the amount of babysitting you had to do got less and less, and suddenly we could see a path to where anyone can just type in something and a program comes out.

All we can do is forsee one step ahead, through the haze. We've never done anything like this before. There are no great oracles out there who can see the future here. Sorry. Everyone is half blind.

Yep, pretty much this.

When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

"Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don't want to take the red eye flight from "London" Isle of Skye airport... you get the idea and before you know it that £19 flight is a £190 flight. Amazons price structure is the same, cheap headline price, what you actually pay is much, much higher.

Yes, that's exactly the point: there ISN'T anything.

You're claiming that there IS. So cite the thing that IS.

record ambient conversations illegally

Only illegal outside of single-party consent states.

"Ambient conversations" include (and some would argue consist exclusively of) conversations in which you're not a party.

There is a legitimate use for people with certain disabilities, but sadly there's no way to use them for legitimate purposes without Meta having the opportunity to piggy-back on the usage and abuse them for illegitimate purposes.

One word: Meta.

A space weapons arms race plus one million data center satellites.

What could possibly go wrong?

Every time humanity invents a tool that fundamentally changes how we live, a wave of panic follows. When writing was invented Socrates warned it would ruin our memories. When the printing press arrived, critics claimed that an overload of books would make people foolish and immoral. steam trains were feared, with experts claiming that traveling at the high speed of 30 miles per hour would cause the human body to disintegrate or drive passengers insane. In every case, these technologies did not destroy us; they simply became normal parts of daily life. Todays fears about AI are being heavily pushed by the tech companies themselves, but for a very different reason. By keeping everyone focused on sci-fi scenarios about killer robots ending the world, these corporations divert attention from immediate & real-world lawsuits. They are actively lobbying governments for protection against copyright theft claims and suing for immunity when their systems cause real world harm. Calling for strict safety regulations allows them to create a "regulatory moat", making it too expensive and legally risky for smaller competitors or open-source projects to survive, while keeping the big players legally protected.

False. People on both sides ranted about the Epstein files during the Biden administration, now maggots have gotten suspiciously quiet, even the ones who haven't obviously suffered massive brain damage and have to be wheeled around making taxidermy turtle faces.

I just hope it didn't cost you any tokens.

You are a clown every day.

It won't help in any way because the pictures are sent home for more processing.

Casks leak. There is a whole industry around dealing with it. Deal with it.

Oh, you peaked in high school? You can stick your high school level understanding of economics up your ass next to your junior high school understanding of reproductive biology and your utter lack of ethics.