Hah I actually remembered this too, and people were still hyping Elon Musk at the time as well.

TBF the researchers knew what they had could be scaled into something gamebreaking which is how we got ChatGPT-3, but OpenAI made it sound like they already had it nailed down several years before it actually blew up. I think their unreleased examples they gave were a newspaper and short story written by AI which they said was indistinguishable from human material.

They didn't entirely miss the mark there. They publicly released the version after that and the world became worse. That certainly fits for some definition of 'dangerous', even tho it's probably not how they were thinking.