Dwarkesh Patels’s wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident

The popular podcaster Dwarkesh Patel wrote something completely viral about the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, which purports to tell the whole story in plain English:

It’s well-written and compelling, and it reminds me of something Douglas Hofstadter once wrote about Ray Kurzweil:

“What I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”

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Anil Seth, the clearest thinker on AI and consciousness, was the first to alert me, texting me a long, excellent tweet of his, which began thusly:

's summary of the incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by