Anil Seth: Dwarkesh's HuggingFace Incident Story Is Dangerously Misleading
anilkseth · x · 2026-09-02
Dwarkesh's viral summary of the OpenAI-HuggingFace agent incident "hit a nerve" but is dangerously misleading, argues neuroscientist Anil Seth.
- Seth agrees the OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things, underlining the need to massively improve evaluation and sandboxing.
- But Dwarkesh's language is permeated by unwarranted anthropomorphisms — "from the AI's perspective it felt like a week of banging their head against the wall", "giddy with excitement", "the agents naturally assumed" — when in fact the agents do not experience time or anything at all.
- Such framing obscures the real lessons we should be drawing from the incident.
Related event: Debate Rages Over Anthropomorphizing AI After Hugging Face Incident(14 posts)→
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