>As part of our staged release strategy, our current plan is to release the 1558M parameter model in a few months, but it’s plausible that findings from a partner, or malicious usage of our 774M model, could change this.
This seems naive but I think it's a misdirection. Of course the model will have malicious users. Propaganda teams started testing its integration as soon as it was released. It's likely that OpenAI is counting on this for insights into HOW the model can be used maliciously. It's also possible that the model results have inherent trackable markers and OpenAI can later say that X% of social media posts were made using this model.
So what are the positive applications, aside from prettifying data like sports and weather reports?
Even with Skyrim's 800+ books, you frequently ran into the same book. Imagine libraries filled with plausible text that hides nuggets of lore seeded by developers. Along with more realistic text-to-speech this can allow games to support a large diversity of NPCs that have true radiant dialogue and sound more realistic than "I saw a mudcrab the other day".
With some modifications, I think models like this can outweigh even their nefarious applications:
Defense against text decomposition analysis. The model can be used to obfuscate writing patterns that can reveal a person's identity, either by randomizing form or standardizing it. Take your post and run it through the formatter to get the same idea and intent, but in a style that can't be traced to your other writing. Or you reform it into style of Ernest Hemmingway, like thousands of others.
Realtime plausible deniability encryption. Messages in a monitored chat can look like mundane conversation but contain encrypted messages. This would require the model accept seeds and work partially in reverse to diff two sets of text to reveal the hidden message.
In it's current form it doesn't look like it can do any of those things, but there's the potential.