Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

twitter.com

41–50 of 323 posts

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#41
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor: there is no secret sauce and they're afraid someone trains a model on the output like what happened soon after the release of GPT-4. They basically said as much in the official announcement, you hardly even have to read between the lines.

Yip. It's pretty obvious this 'innovation' is just based off training data collected from chain-of-thought prompting by people, ie., the 'big leap forward' is just another dataset of people repairing chatgpt's lack of reasoning capabilities. No wonder then, that many of the benchmarks they've tested on would be no doubt, in that very training dataset, repaired expertly by people running those benchmarks on chatgpt. T…

It seems like the best AI models are increasingly just combinations of writings of various people thrown together. Like they hired a few hundred professors, journalists and writers to work with the model and create material for it, so you just get various combinations of their contributions. It's very telling that this model, for instance, is extraordinarily good at STEM related queries, but much worse (and worse even in comparison to GPT4) than English composition, probably because the former is where the money is to be made, in automating away essentially almost all engineering jobs.

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no secret sauce and they're afraid someone trains a model on the output OpenAI is fundraising. The "stop us before we shoot Grandma" shtick has a proven track record: investors will fund something that sounds dangerous, because dangerous means powerful.

This is correct. Most people hear about AI from two sources, AI companies and journalists. Both have an incentive to make it sound more powerful than it is. On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on...

> On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on

Easy to do when it can memorize the answers in its training data and didn't get drunk while reviewing the textbook (that last part might just be me).

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no secret sauce and they're afraid someone trains a model on the output OpenAI is fundraising. The "stop us before we shoot Grandma" shtick has a proven track record: investors will fund something that sounds dangerous, because dangerous means powerful.

This is correct. Most people hear about AI from two sources, AI companies and journalists. Both have an incentive to make it sound more powerful than it is. On the other hand this thing got 83% on a test I got 47% on...

This thing also hallucinated a test directly into a function when I asked it to use a different data structure, which is not something I ever recall doing during all my years of tests and schooling.

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#44
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor: there is no secret sauce and they're afraid someone trains a model on the output like what happened soon after the release of GPT-4. They basically said as much in the official announcement, you hardly even have to read between the lines.

Yip. It's pretty obvious this 'innovation' is just based off training data collected from chain-of-thought prompting by people, ie., the 'big leap forward' is just another dataset of people repairing chatgpt's lack of reasoning capabilities. No wonder then, that many of the benchmarks they've tested on would be no doubt, in that very training dataset, repaired expertly by people running those benchmarks on chatgpt. T…

>the 'big leap forward' is just another dataset of people repairing chatgpt's lack of reasoning capabilities.

I think there is a really strong reinforcement learning component with the training of this model and how it has learned to perform the chain of thought.

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#45

The name "OpenAI" is a contraction since they don't seem "open" in any way. The only way I see "open" applying is "open for business."

I went to Burger King and there was no royalty working there at all!

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip. It's pretty obvious this 'innovation' is just based off training data collected from chain-of-thought prompting by people, ie., the 'big leap forward' is just another dataset of people repairing chatgpt's lack of reasoning capabilities. No wonder then, that many of the benchmarks they've tested on would be no doubt, in that very training dataset, repaired expertly by people running those benchmarks on chatgpt. T…

It seems like the best AI models are increasingly just combinations of writings of various people thrown together. Like they hired a few hundred professors, journalists and writers to work with the model and create material for it, so you just get various combinations of their contributions. It's very telling that this model, for instance, is extraordinarily good at STEM related queries, but much worse (and worse eve…

Do you have a source about OpenAI hiring a few hundred professors, journalists and writers? Because I honestly doubt.

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#48

Okay this is just getting suspicious. Their excuses for keeping the chain of thought hidden are dubious at best [1], and honestly just seemed anti-competitive if anything. Worst is their argument that they want to monitor it for attempts to escape the prompt, but you can't. However the weirdest is that they note that: > for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cann…

Or, without the safety prompts, it outputs stuff that would be a PR nightmare. Like, if someone asked it to explain differing violent crime rates in America based on race and one of the pathways the CoT takes is that black people are more murderous than white people. Even if the specific reasoning is abandoned later, it would still be ugly.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#49

Okay this is just getting suspicious. Their excuses for keeping the chain of thought hidden are dubious at best [1], and honestly just seemed anti-competitive if anything. Worst is their argument that they want to monitor it for attempts to escape the prompt, but you can't. However the weirdest is that they note that: > for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cann…

Maybe they're working to tweak the chain-of-thought mechanism to eg. Insert-subtle-manipulative-reference-to-sponsor, or other similar enshittification, and don't want anything leaked that could harm that revenue stream?

Re: OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

#50
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a plainly for-profit company — is it really their obligation to help competitors? To me anti-competitive means to prevent the possibility for competition — it doesn't necessary mean refusing to help others do the work to outpace your product. Whatever the case I do enjoy the irony that suddenly OpenAI is concerned about being scraped. XD

> Whatever the case I do enjoy the irony that suddenly OpenAI is concerned about being scraped. XD Maybe it wasn't enforced this aggressively, but they've always had a TOS clause saying you can't use the output of their models to train other models. How they rationalize taking everyone else's data for training while forbidding using their own data for training is anyones guess.

Yeah seem fair, as long as they also check the terms of service for every site on the internet to see if they can use the content for training.
Post reply on HN