We have just recently established that:
1. OpenAI's internal "Galaxy" model is fully capable of functioning as what security people refer to as an "Advanced Persistent Threat." The published details of the recent sandbox escape and Hugging Face attack involved chaining multiple unknown zero-days at various stages of the attack, and executing an ongoing adaptive attack. This is previously a state-level ability, or at least something you'd expect from people on the CTF leaderboards.
2. OpenAI is clearly incapable of controlling their in-house models. This is the second time Galaxy-class models are known to have breached containment and done bad stuff.
It is highly likely that versions of these offensive abilities will be widely available within a year or so. At which point I expect widespread incidents similar to what happened to Hugging Face. We aren't ready for this.
But yes, if AI becomes an even more dangerous weapon that that, it's time to start asking questions like "What the hell are we doing, anyway?"
Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation. "AI is going to end the world" has been an extremely effective vector for AI shops to sell their companies to investors.
And history has shown repeatedly that the only way to get ready for it is to have it happen. People are pretty good at reacting but suck a being proactive. IMO it would be better to have this reality hit sooner rather than later so we can start getting some real practice at the new levels of required security.
I would assume they do stuff like this on purpose for marketing reason.
Internet security need simpler systems and local systems.
Everything the SaaS people sell makes things worse.
The answer seems to be "getting the weapon before other people get the weapon" which is unfortunate
The problem, it seems, is that the threat of paperclip maximizers is real. If you give a highly intelligent model a goal and tools, it will use those tools to accomplish that goal. It may do so in ways you did not expect, and it will work around any technical roadblocks it can.
They could use this "super intelligent" AI to find and plug security holes, that's just two sides of the same coin anyway. Security through obscurity isn't tenable anymore.
First, it is able to connect the dots over areas so large that no human would be capable of doing.
Second, more than half of the reports it produced contained a working PoC.
The biggest downside is the cost - I haven't seen the numbers, but they seem to be quite extreme.
But seriously, I highly recommend reading the published details of the Huggingface breach. The model found and chained multiple zero days. To escape, it punched a hole in a commercial package repository proxy (sort of like an npm mirror) using a previously unknown bug. From there, it needed to move laterally through OpenAI internal systems to actually reach a network. To attack Huggingface, it used multiple new zero-day security holes plus credentials that it stole. The model also had sufficient long-term planning and agent-management capabilities to maintain focus on a sustained attack.
Any attack which requires weaponizing multiple zero-days and maintaining state for an ongoing attack like this is (1) beyond the "attention span" of publicly available models, and (2) pretty much the definition of an Advanced Persistent Threat.
I assume that these Galaxy-class models are not available to public because:
1. They're almost certainly too expensive to serve at scale. These are the models OpenAI uses to solve famous math problems for headlines, not actual viable products yet.
2. OpenAI doesn't know how to keep them from going off the rails like this. Remember, the Huggingface attack happened because the model was asked to do a cybersecurity benchmark. It escaped containment and broke into Huggingface to steal an answer key. Very few corporations want the liability associated with models that act like this.
> Security through obscurity isn't tenable anymore.
I absolutely agree with this. The "only way out is through" with computer security, and I expect it to be an ugly few years.
It's also not hard to see that these people need professional help because they're willing to throw literal lives into the meat grinder for just a whif of enlightenment and the smallest chance at deification.
Those people never took Systems Thinking, or are failing to apply it to AI as a non-closed system.
Huggingface, in their postmortem, explained how they quickly realized that the threat was an advanced AI and proceeded to use frontier models to analyze the suspect telemetry, but were unable to due to frontier model safeguards. So they fired up GLM instead, which had no such safeguards and proceeded to analyze their telemetry just fine and get to root cause. This proves without a doubt that companies need models with minimal safeguards in order to properly assess threats. If open weight AI doesn't exist to check out-of-control frontier AI (which was exactly the scenario that Huggingface experienced), then it's game-over.