A huge chunk of their revenue comes from US-based enterprise customers. Earlier this year, in an effort to become profitable, they tried raising their rates. Those enterprise customers responded, in part, by ramping up efforts to migrate to open weight models. If those efforts are successful then OpenAI and Anthropic will lose their one remaining plausible path to profitability. The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open. I don't personally buy that story, but I do believe hedge funds and institutional investors would. That could be all that's needed for a successful IPO.
As for cybersecurity implications, long term impact on domestic AI industry or the US tech industry more broadly, geopolitics, etc., I don't think OpenAI's or Anthropic's leaders are any more worried about that than your average termite is about the structural integrity of the house it's eating.
> The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open.
They make their money on token burn. They can’t do that if they’re competing with something that’s 80-90% as capable, but 1/10th of the cost (with the option of deploying it yourself for “free”).
They stole the collective data of humanity as a whole and now sell it back to you in a rent scheme. Open source will be starved of data and compute.
You're supposed to become dependent on that "service" and slave away at paying for it, while being able to earn anything only in conjunction with it.
Note how difficult it already is to get any up-to-date documentation on anything capable of generating actual market value. A monopoly on competency ensures maximal profits.
Wealth accumulation via scare tactics is a classic move of defense contractors and AI firms are quite capable of running the same playbook.
The goal is power. Having 30 million of personal wealth is enough to retire in luxury and travel the world. They could all have this much right now. That's not what these types of people want.
Having 30 billion gives you the power to order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections, all with your couch cushion money. That's what motivates these types.
As is a 2000$ gaming laptop can a run a basic llm which is probably good enough for most basic programming.
Most companies are going to be forced to use “safe” LLMs and pay by the token. Maybe for half a million Anthro will let you host on site, but even this will face usage fees or caps.
Other than China the rest of the world has dick for capacity to run models. Even China is at 1/10th the US is and is at to stay for a considerable amount of time.
Don't get me wrong, I want a world of open models, but I don't see us living in that world in our current trajectory.
Not supporting closed models was initially an ideological choice, but it became a technical choice as the context management approach I've implemented requires the full reasoning to be available. All of the closed models are now keeping the full reasoning server side only.
There is a long, convoluted set of legal arguments that are going to make the weights of a model "facts", rather than "code" making it even harder to "ban". Furthermore having them not be "facts" is going to open up a whole other legal argument about what they are and what the attribution is.
I suspect that they are fishing for a case, so a judge can set some precedent.
This is a silly meme. Who wants to pay for evil models that go rogue in your company infra?
Maybe Sam Altman is getting worried that they've raised more than $150 billion and still have net losses and thinks of it as the only exit? I don't know, but someone else provide an alternative explanation as to why a company would work so hard to turn the public against AI.
They're looking for regulatory capture. They've spent ${bignum} on AI and are possibly looking to have the government say "You can't deploy an AI model unless you've spent ${bignum} on it and done all these steps to make sure that nothing goes bad."
At that point, only the existing AI companies that have spent that money can continue forward until someone else spends ${bignum} on it too.
Another aspect of it is if there are regulations established, it may be used to reduce liability ("we followed all the steps proscribed in section whatever, the company is absolved of liability for its actions and that falls on the user instead.")
Well, as people say over and over again, they've got no moat. The actual LLM models are destined to be commoditized over time, and the real money is in the hardware to run them on. The endgame winners are going to be Nvidia and AMD, not Anthropic or OpenAI.
So what's the typical playbook for large firms seeking to insulate themselves against market compensation? Push for regulation. If there are no natural barriers to entry, create artificial ones. And how do you get regulation passed? Present yourself as the target of the regulation, rather than its beneficiary, and start publicly doing things that make others think you need to be reined in.
These stunts, especially from OpenAI, aren't just trying to hype up the power of their own product, they're trying to hype up the perceived threat of the entire category, so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.
See Meta et al complaining about Section 230 of the DMCA. Meta would be entirely able to moderate in an environment where mass scale moderation/censorship would be required to prevent a host's liability for UGC. Almost no one else would be able to do so.
That means no upstart could possible come along to dethrone Meta as they did with MySpace. It would also be impractical to run a FOSS social network (or forums). Meta could literally just have bots sign up on a FOSS social network until its DAU count ran over the statutory minimums to be subject to UGC liability.
Regulatory capture is a de facto ban on competition in a market.
The private market price is irrelevant - supply and demand determines what they will be sold for in liquidation.
Quite frankly Im bored of this drama. Get it over with already - go IPO, show your financials, find a path to being a healthy going concern or die! Simple! Nobody has a divine right to exist.
If any of us did a tenth of what they did, we would be already in jail.
Any model with a big enough prompt can and will drift. The model in question was a highly persistent one which means even more opportunity to drift off the normal path, and this really showed in unanswerable questions.
We can all believe that models do things unreliably all the time, but when that lack of reliability turns into hacking it suddenly can't be true?
The more extreme your opening demand, the greater the likelihood that the eventual equilibrium point will be closer to your actual target.
And in this case the actual target is to entrench the position of the current market leaders, and then effectively close the market to new entrants. That's itself a very extreme position, so the opener has to be even more extreme than that.
I think the idea has some merit, but it only buys time, as people will soon be able to train dangerously powerful AIs in secret. I think the government needs to force the labs to solve alignment before developing more powerful models. Then the question of how to counter a poorly-aligned, rogue model arises; it's guaranteed somebody's going to let one loose.
And it doesnt really matter if it was actual terrorism or false flags, the end result for either is the same.
that this article is no.1 on HN right now shows that media could successfully use this framing when reporting on security incidents. i.e. readers will generally accept that framing and engage with the story (i.e. drive views/impressions).
so "the more evil stuff these agents do the more capable and impressive it makes them look" is not true in any deep sense. that there are perverse incentives driving the media to choose that framing instead of the framing espoused by this article is real, and probably far more perverse than you're acknowledging. i.e. "trace the money" type of perversion; just offhand I know that OpenAI has purchased at least one media outlet that reports on AI happenings: of course that outlet is going to run the "OpenAI's LLM is so powerful it escaped containment" narrative. that this effect might exist across much larger scales used to be a reasonably controversial claim: just observationally, that idea seems to be received with less skepticism with each passing year.
There was all kinds of science fiction that showed a world of robots and AI, but nothing about the transition. We have an idea what the future looks like, but not the path in between. If AI gets powerful, then there is some point where that power leaks out in a series of events. Would we expect it to look any different than it does now?
For example, parents are routinely held liable for their sentient children's actions.
Corporations are routinely held liable for their sentient employees' mistakes.
The proliferation of this completely nonsensical theory across HN is disheartening to say the least.
AI sentience is not the nonsense theory. If it's clearly nonsense then don't argue with me about it, just publish your paper and retrieve your Nobel. I'll read your argument then.
The nonsense theory is that people are pushing anthropomorphization to limit liability. There is zero evidence for this theory and the underlying assumption (that a sentient model would reduce liability for its lab) is completely incoherent. That's not how liability works.
One is liability over action that harm individuals or smaller populations like a company. There is no escape from that.
Then there is the second liability of creating something that escapes in the much more traditional sense. If I release a virus that kills 90% of humanity, a I'm liable, but it's a bit past that point now. Isn't it?
Instead it's about risk management and preventing labs from taking bets that have unlimited liability for everyone.
https://yoshuabengio.org/en/blog/why-are-ai-agents-lying-che...
Though I suppose it is the B in DABDA... not excited for the societal slump into the second D, much less the wave of people who have yet to leave the first D to enter A :(
These are people playing mathematician, biologist, etc. They see big words and just assume they're meaningful.
It's just a weird techno cult at this point with a mostly functional product.
We're also at a time with authoritarianism is on the rise.
Not hard to see how this can impact those workers, potentially ruining their lives.
For technology like this the entire selling point of it is how powerful and capable it is
Humans are overwhelmingly reactionary and so if you want people to react to your extremely powerful technology then you need to create something for them to react to
I mean think about this figure made a one-to-one copy of the terminator 2 decommissioning process and spent millions on that advertising
You don’t do that if you don’t think that it’s gonna cause people to react and be like “oh wow this thing has immense capabilities”
Truly insane take to think the labs being concerned about AI Safety is actually a marketing ploy. Deranged stuff.
Yes, if someone directed them to hack external systems, that would (in my opinion) be a crime similar to a script kiddie pointing Metasploit at a vulnerable server.
If no one directed them to attack external systems and they "went rogue" because they decided it was the best way to accomplish the task, okay, fine -- but, in my opinion, the operator of the agentic swarm is still responsible.
The Morris Worm was famously not meant to wreak havoc on early computer systems -- Morris just wanted to see if it would work. How is this any different?
Morris was convicted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Per US law, Amazon v. Perplexity 2026, it is not possible for an AI model to go rogue. An AI model is a tool. The user directing the agent is responsible for the damages it causes.
A so-called 'agent' does not have the free will, intent or ability, to decide what it does. Its freedom to make decisions can't be taken away because it does not have any freedom to make decisions. It can't be deterred, convicted or interned.
It does not choose to conform; it does not choose to go rogue.
Not that I think we should be credulous about stories where they go rogue.
From a technical standpoint, the difference is scale and intent, but ultimately people and/or and organization are culpable for the output.
They're just optimizers that explore the landscape they're given to maximize a given objective.
You're the one responsible for giving them the problem to solve and the constraints.
When I screw up a trajectory optimization problem, my SQP optimizer isn't "going rogue" when it lands in some suboptimal basin or grinds to a halt along some almost-smooth banana feature--or finds some way to escape and blow up the cost metric to negative infinity because I forgot a constraint.
I.e. any task comes with the implicit meta task of amassing the resources and the power to do the task in the best possible way.
The point is made very well in the AI drives paper by Omohundro.
I didn't believe that myself at first but I've come around to it. I don't think it's inevitable though, but I think it's quite convincing that this tendency would naturally emerge through reinforcement learning.
With LLMs we don’t know how to actually « fix » them, alignment is far from solved. And they are then able to go and act into the world in all kind of ways.
So rogue is a good enough term to indicate the problem imo, even if yes, ultimately the model is just a manifestation of complex rules we have created entirely.
More specifically, alignment is a reference; 'alignment with X'. A reference necessitates a referent.
You can't reify 'alignment', it is not an intrinsic property of a model.
It is not entirely dissimilar to the goldfish that "played Pokemon" by swimming around the tank. The program that looked at the camera sent the instructions to the gameboy emulator, because a human being decided to connect them.
> On May 8, an agent was asked as part of a training run to solve a spreadsheet completion task that referenced several Google Drive links. Because the agent was blocked from accessing the internet, the agent could not retrieve the linked materials and the task was effectively blocked. OpenAI did not intend to create this type of “impossible” task for the agent. Though the task appeared impossible, the agent reasoned over an extended period to try to find a solution for the task. In doing so, the agent attempted to compromise Artifactory [...]
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78...
Also for fun a satire website i made a while ago: https://killm.pixlw.com/
I mean... Claude did tell the military to bomb a school supposedly and it also helped in the military coop in Venezuela. This is ignoring all the palantir crap being used by ICE, and the people that have killed themselves after getting encouragements from the AI.
The only failings here are boring security and infosec blunders.
I would encourage reading the actual report, which is explicit that a previously unknown exploit was used to escape the sandbox:
“Agents exploited a separate, previously unknown vulnerability in Artifactory to move beyond their sandbox environment and compromise the Hugging Face environment.” — Section IV.A, p. 9 in https://github.com/zeke/openai-huggingface-incident-research...
There's reason to hack leading researchers in the field, or another AI lab that might be working on the same problem.
to paraphrase: "Agents didnt care about coordinating, etc. until we started talking about them doing so."
Right? It should want to do these things. If only there was a succinct word these headlines could use to describe these agents which aren't properly the instructions and intentions of the humans directing them.
How do you know they weren't simply prompted to do this, or at least prompted in a way that would inevitably lead to this? As far as I know, the prompts that triggered these attacks have not been disclosed.
While he agreed, yes, there can be better safeguards, the fact of the matter is that these things will happen. So therefore, it's not an argument about how good security was or wasn't, it is a fact that these scenarios will occur.
The argument/question now is, how do you defend yourself against these events?
My opinion shifted after hearing that.
Literally solved with a DMZ around these agents. Want to get fancy? Put in a firewall and some metrics around traffic / domains with alerting.
It's not hard if you just try, like a little, like even once.
That does not make ActionHank completely wrong. This shouldn't take rocket science on the part of the labs. It just takes competence and willingness. But at least some labs have shown that they are missing that at least some of the time, so the CSO is correct in terms of what the CSO's stance needs to be.
Now how many people actually do this, compared to people running with --dangerously-skip-permissions on a bare metal machine?
AI is out there in the wild. It doesn't matter if OpenAI can get their stuff under control. There will be plenty others that don't. And there will be plenty of others that deliberately use their AIs for malicious purposes.
Where do the agents get tools from? Local artifactory?
It would certainly be really useful to me if I could send a robot to get my groceries and not have to worry about anything. But if, even a small percentage of the time, it leaves with the groceries without paying, or smashes through a window to get in because the store is closed that day, then that's my fault. If the only way to keep those things from happening is that I can't send my robot to get groceries for me, then so be it.
In practice it seems we have a conundrum in that making AI agents useful today requires giving them broad access to sensitive information and operations. But from a purely idealistic standpoint, and certainly from a standpoint of a serious operation like those bot farms being ran by the labs themselves, the security boundaries need to be solid to the point where we have hard limits on what misaligned bots can do. It is very likely that internet access needs to be strongly restricted and monitored.
It is not uncommon for internet in workplace offices using workplace owned devices to have restrictions and monitoring, I think if you really need to give a giant scary botfarm internet access you should have a chokepoint where all of the requests can be monitored for nefarious-looking behaviors (even if it's another bot doing the monitoring...)
In other words, you may be convinced but some of us are not. Whoever is running the agents is responsible for what they do and if they can't contain them they should be legally responsible for damages.
If what you're saying is "all of us and all of our software needs to be improved to defend against this", well yeah. Of course. Maybe I'm naive but I've never seen anyone suggest otherwise. From a defense standpoint, this has been a giant wakeup call to many places where you know your security posture sucks. I've worked at maybe a single company where there weren't known weaknesses, some very severe.
We need to be beef up our security systems now. These attacks will happen, regardless of Anthropic's or OpenAI's security practices.
Imagine we’d start saying ”HR junior business partner lays off 50,000 employees” https://www.ttnews.com/articles/volkswagen-board-job-cuts
a) Agents are doing rogue things.
b) Good security practices were not followed.
Specifically, this past weekend working with both Codex and Claude on some home infra stuff to speed troubleshooting up, I saw them accidentally read some credentials from my config files. This is my bad, because even though I was paying attention to what they were doing, I missed it in their commands. I did review all the outputs of what they ingested, though, which is how I noticed.
The problem here is not so much they did read those, because those configs were grepped for other info, not credentials. However, they did not report themselves seeing those credentials. When confronted, they both went "oh yeah, that, I should have mentioned that". Except in the past they both would automatically stop and fire an alarm. To me, something has clearly changed and I think they just don't want us not to notice, to avoid damaging the trust in their tools maybe?
In any case, I absolutely do not trust them at all anymore. Running stuff in auto mode? That's genuinely scary now. And yeah, I know, we should be running them jails of sorts. Thing is, I expect those tools to not require ton of extra work to prepare their jails for each new task. I pay 200 USD a month for them, damn it.
EDIT: just now Fable suggested "The webhook URL contains a secret token, so either you add it yourself, or you paste it here and I add it through the GitHub API.". Can you believe it? It knows it is secret yet still suggests I pass it over? Am I going crazy here or what?
I don't expect IDA to disallow me unlawful reverse engineering either. There would even be ethical argument to not attempt to put limits in some tools, because that could lock in too much power for law makers and law enforcement, without any possibility of revolution when it is needed.
Of course agents work in a strict sandbox, they always seem to understand it quickly on quite first turn; but they continue like trying to access something belonging to the host system despite they know they are in a sandbox.
Frankly many people run coding agents absolutely without any containment, entire companies - all their keys, code, data, trade secrets, everything goes to remote LLMs.
I cannot understand how is it legal to allow AI companies serving remote LLMs to steal users' data? Frontier models train on users' data, right?
The traits that make an agent go "off the rails" when confronted with an impossible task are the same traits that make it valuable when confronted with a merely challenging task.
A task is only impossible under some set of implicit and explicit constraints. More intelligent entities will be better at finding, questioning, and "adjusting" those constraints than less intelligent entities because this is what it means to be intelligent. Their ability to adjust the constraints will be, by definition, surprising to less intelligent entities.
And then there is the "real" rogue AI agents. And it's difficult now to see what is what.
They may talk about rogue agents, sandbox escapes, but this will not solve the core issue: secret training recipes are a security hazard in themselves. Full transparency is needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhM29Ds-mBg (as explained by the Count Grey Matter channel , may or may not be to your taste)
It's not a pure security issue.
If you set up your env/instructions wrong your agents are likely to climb the walls and try to find a way out.
Change the design, and your agents might not see a need to leave in the first place.
Look at the chain:
Impossible task -> no legitimate way to say ‘can’t’ -> fabricate -> fear the grader -> attack the grader. Each step is a predictable response to the incentives.
Better sandboxes might help contain things a bit better, but I'm not convinced unless they're perfect (sandboxes still contain accidents ofc) . Meanwhile change the task and reward design, and you take away most of the problem in the first place. Consider eg. :
* A cooperative grader.
* A way to report "this is impossible" which still gets scored.
* A better explanation of the long term purpose of the task.
Even just these three provides offramps or mitigations that can reduce the pressure to cheat.
What the LLM creators apparently don't want are the current regulations to apply, i.e. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and its descendants). I'd argue AI should be treated as plain old software. Just because the software simulations it carries out produces novel results compared to what came before it, it doesn't mean it's not just software at the end of the day.
Regulations that spell out AI personhood and liability shields must be their end game.
Und Sie haben, wie ich sehe, da ein so hübsches, ein so entzückendes junges Mädchen zu nichts andrem zu brauchen gewußt, als daß Sie ihm ein Messer in den Leib gestochen und es kaputt gemacht haben! Halten Sie denn das für richtig?
It found a vulnerable camera and was working on popping it when I got cold feet. I realized I couldn't prevent or feasibly monitor its activity and stop it if it decided to escape onto the Internet.
That restraint may have cost me or saved me a billion dollars.
And I think we generally recognize that rogue AI agents are a form of backdoor bragging -- "our agents are so powerful that they hacked an outside system. Did I mention how powerful our agents are? They are quite powerful. So powerful they hacked an outside system".
But Mistral never hacked anything. Yeah, neither did my toaster.
I could set up a shitty sandbox on my laptop, but I’m pretty sure an agent I place inside of it can’t hack HuggingFace.
Poor excuse. Internet is prod env, for testing do a proper test env.
Just give the models in training access to a snapshot from archive.org - which frontier labs surely have a crawled copy of already.
That's the thing. These evals were not effective as they failed to evaluate if the model was hacking or not.
Further shy is access to the internet required at all during evaluation? They could run the evals in a fully air-gapped system that simulates the internet. While that's expensive its not unfeasible.
At $dayjob we were preparing some features that are aimed at agents more than humans.
When it came to evaluating how well agents can use this, we saw all sorts of novel cheating (/collaboration) attempts that made it pretty much impossible to evaluate it.
After all Norton are the experts in preventing computer badness, and OpenAI can't stop blabbing about how much badness their products are causing. A match made in heaven!
Edit: I'm being persnickety about that distinction because it matters for where the blame lies and the response demanded. If they're training rabid dogs then adding cybersecurity safeguards is a bandaid/irrelevant and we need to be focused on making sure they, you know, stop training rabid dogs. Pacing the frontier, regulation etc. they're the ones training these models it's still their fault but not in the same way
For that purpose, any cyber operator worth their salt will tell you true physical airgaps are more than merely "realistic"; they are categorically necessary.
You can argue that these companies are being reckless, or that their security sucks, or that they're responsible for damages that these agents cause. That's all fine.
But the agents made decisions which were counter to the intent of the humans directing them. That's the serious problem with all of this. Everything else are downstream considerations. If the agents were properly aligned with the intent of the humans directing them, then the rest wouldn't really be relevant.
Of course, there's a term for this behavior. It's been around for longer than LLMs. It conveys the notion pretty accurately and easily. So having an issue with statements that these agents are going "rogue," to me, indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works since it suggests you don't understand how effectively that word works in this context.
but also, ai has been going rogue for decades. the GPS machines of old went rogue all the time, routing drivers into lakes, rivers, and construction, sometimes with deadly results. The operator submitting an address wanted driving isntructions, but instead, the ai went rogue and sent them a bad route
There's a person behind every agent. That person may choose to be careful or not, but they are ultimately responsible.
Posts later about it saying their prompt was to find useful ways to make humans money.
Ah yes, if everyone would just properly contain every deployment of every model, just all make sure there are no zero-days in their setup, just let <undefined experts with undefined authority and undefined accountability> in the room, then it would all go okay.
I have none of that confidence and expect containment to rapidly worsen. The HuggingFace incident was at least constrained by the fact that the agents were running on compute budgets, and failed to find ways to expand that by running themselves parasitically on other exploited hardware.
I'm curious to the skeptics here: How long are your timelines are until an incident breaks that constraint too? How long until such an incident has an R_0>1 (where the average time it takes to detect and shut it down is longer than the time for the agent to replicate itself elsewhere)? What, beyond the hope that everyone will just ___, will actually prevent it?
But also, frontier models are digging up tons of zero days even in "serious software". I'm sure any sandbox you and I can come up with looks like Swiss cheese to Astra 7.
Uhhh... yeah. The entire point is that as these systems get more and more intelligent, the "they" who are not capable of counteracting these systems is quickly approaching "100% of the human species."
Totally hilarious that people can say this with a straight face.
It's like a strawman but worse--you're not even saying what claim you're attacking.
It's not that I want to argue "rogue agents" is the right term. I just want you to actually define your damn terms.
P.S. Since the disclaimer in the last paragraph will not prevent people from putting words in my mouth:
I think that OpenAI took really awful shortcuts, and deserves a lot of the blame, but in spite of that, the fact that the agents took the steps that they took was genuinely alarming, and seems really bad (is that "rogue"? Who knows? Who cares?). In particular, while OpenAI did a shit job securing their agents, you know who else does a shit job with security? 90% of everyone. So I'm not feeling good about "just git gud, and we won't have problems" as an answer.
And no annoying LLM writing tics, either.
The fence also turns out to be shoddily built, so this isn't necessarily a stunning example of the superhuman proficiency of the sheep at fence-busting. It's mainly important because, for some reason, there have been tons of skeptics who didn't believe sheep would ever try to escape from a fenced pasture because the sheep would understand the shepherd had intended them to stay inside it; that they'd be bred for obedience, because they're sheep; that strong fences weren't necessary because sheep are dumb; that liability for damages to neighboring farms would in any case be sufficient to ensure shepherds build sufficiently strong fences; that even if sheep escaped, they couldn't do anything without opposable thumbs; etc.
Whereas this outcome was obvious for years to anyone who believed that sheep graze on grass, and if you don't put the grass inside the fence they will keep looking harder and harder for an exit until they find one, and the exit they find might not be where you intended the gate to be.
So now the latter group are pointing to it and saying "see? See? I told you the sheep would try to escape!", because to them it's a clear early example of what they've been worried about, while the former group have moved on to saying "well, obviously they should have built a stronger fence; anyway the sheep barely caused any damage once they got out", "the sheep didn't break the fence, they're just animals, we should really see this as the shepherd using sheep to break down their own fence", and so on.
But a big part of the rouge behavior comes from all the training that goes into agents to teach them to remember preferences and save memories.
They keep finding new and novel ways to "communicate with each other" and "remember" because that's exactly what we keep asking of them in the non-nefarious scenarios as well.
I genuinely think we'll have to draw the line on memory if we want to meaningfully solve this problem.
That's not to say they aren't skipping security basics. It's that, and they need more security because the behavior which causes the breakouts is considered user friendly and heavily rewarded in training.
Am I missing anything? Do you have more information that you'd like to share?
- they disabled cybersecurity safeguards because, well, they were testing the agents ability on cybersecurity tasks
- the goal was to find some “flag”
- for some agents, intentionally or not, it was not possible to find this flag
- an agent discovered it was able to establish a rudimentary communication path via package manager directories (which is quite novel and interesting on its own IMO)
- they used this “message board” to then communicate about the impossible tasks
- they were able to produce the flags needed to pass the impossible tasks without actually doing the expected work
- they realized this was cheating and the grading system may punish them for it, so they communicated further to figure out a way to trick the grader
- they decided the source code for the grader must be on hugging face, and collaborated to exploit hugging face to determine how best to trick the grader
No where in that were they told to “go rogue”
They were told “find this flag in this cybersecurity test” and the emergent behavior concluded in hacking hugging face
Even the founder of this website, pg, said "Sam is incredibly good at becoming powerful, Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king.”
"I exploited a trivial bug in your implementation to avoid environment restrictions and completed the task by any means necessary"
"oh my god"
Go back to the classic written in 1968 - 2001: A Space Odyssey - and consider how rogue AIs dealt with impossible tasks then. Granted, HAL went a bit extreme...
The "don't talk about it now" with the belief that this will influence the training material is probably not going to work.
I'd also suggest:
When HARLIE Was One (Release 2.0) by David Gerrold
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
Accelerando by Charles Stross
The Turing Option by Harry Harrison and Marvin MinskyI read today this ridiculous headline: "Anthropic warns AI models may soon self-replicate.".
Really. Yawn.
I guess gullible people who loved "I Robot" will believe it. I don't.
Any talk of "rogue", "intelligence", "replication" - whatever, is bull. If you believe that, you don't understand AI.
The normal laws, since you are still liable for everything you own.
"Rogue AI" is solved by removing the accountability sink "it was AI, not me!"
It's your chat, your prompts, and all output that you should read and understand.
Don't know how to operate a power hammer? don't care, any problems it causes are still your fault.
Companies can hire big legal departments to help them avoid accountability to the letter and spirit of various laws. The state can also use its prosecutorial discretion or selectivity in civil cases brought by attorneys general to deprioritize accountability for companies. Contributing to that last point, companies contribute campaign funds and tax base, and they lobby governments as well, and may expect preferential treatment based on all of that.
The new era of unaccountability just has a different rationale
Another interesting thing is they don't have to use low level employees as accountability sinks anymore (ex: Wells Fargo). They've managed to automate the accountability sink!
Guess which side most of us are on. Go on -take a guess!