At the moment, their main "customer" is investors, not users. But even users want to use the most dangerous model, because dangerous is just another word for powerful.

Sports cars are advertised with how fast they can accelerate from time to time, or tesla's "ludicrous mode" - that is them advertising how dangerous it is.

Car companies sell mostly the same car every year. They don’t have billions (or trillions) of dollars of debt riding on the next model they release being substantially better and cheaper (closer to profitability) than the previous one.

These AI companies have been selling AGI as coming any day for a while now. If it doesn’t arrive soon, the safety angle may be the only spin that keeps the massive (and required) investments pouring in.

If instead the narrative became that LLM progress was slowing, we’d almost certainly be looking at the next global recession.

At this point, there is too much money in AI for the truth to have much of a chance.

Motorcycle manufacturers have been known to do so. Riding a motorcycle is thrilling in part because it is dangerous. The fact that powerful motorcycles are so difficult to control that most people have no business owning one is absolutely used to make them sound cool and desirable.

For instance, this article repeatedly mentions danger and the need for absolute focus and control:

https://www.triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/for-the-ride/news/inspi...

There is also a parallel (though not a very close one) to "pacing the frontier": there's a gentleman's agreement that limits the top speed of motorcycles to 300 kph (186 mph) because of concern that faster bikes would be unsafe enough to bring about a regulatory crackdown.

Different type of business. Many car companies release new cars showing you how much more powerful and implied dangerous they are. Both in capabilities and design style. In the US (other places too , but especially) they also get much bigger with less visibility which gets double dangerous. But the sentiment they're going for is pretty close - "you want this powerful thing, don't you?"

> so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive?

How about we actually try to make it sound cool? They're not releasing the new car because the horsepower was too much, they need more time to get it under control.

I could easily see a car company doing that.

Because they declare that their product is unsafe regularly, which gains massive exposure on every news outlet worldwide, then they release the model anyway with zero negative repercussions.

What's with so many people using bad analogies to try and explain simple topics?

Last time this happened: GPT - 4 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sa...