Hugging Face has expressed that they're willing to let things slide and not sue or press charges... if OpenAI offers them $100M of services in kind (i.e. compute)[1] and makes full disclosure of how the whole thing happened, ostensibly so that repetitions can be curbed and defences built.
In almost any other sector, a government regulator would be stepping in. e.g. If a food company was testing out a new kind of refrigerator and sold a bunch of contaminated produce to supermarkets, they'd be under a microscope. Supermarkets wouldn't be saying, "Give us $100M in fruit and veggies and we'll let this slide".
The only unfair thing in this comparison is that regular people were directly harmed by the hypothetical produce. Can OpenAI guarantee that nobody gets hurt the next time their AI gets out of its playpen? They can't make that guarantee, so why aren't government regulators knocking on OpenAI's door? The fact that this isn't happening should be deeply concerning to everyone.
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[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/113280-hugging-face-ceo-isnt-s...
No, not really, and with LLMs an air gapped system may not tell you anything useful.
Now, yes, the first part of testing you want an air gapped system to tell you if the system is going to stupidly do bad things. But an gapped system tells you nothing about the systems capabilities to do smart bad things. There's already a number of papers out there on LLMs detecting they were in evaluation mode and changing their behaviors.
It is unfortunate that we have so little information on the incident because we actually need to understand the early stages of the task and how it developed into the later dangerous stages of attack. For example, would any of this have occurred if the agent didn't find the system to use as a message board? If that would have prevented it, then we actually have a blind spot on what the model can do once out in the wild, or if it got into the wild.
Testing agentic systems is much much more difficult than testing software. Your software just doesn't suddenly develop the will or desire to escape confinement. Generally you're worried about human actors, internal or external, causing the problems not a digital agent breaking out. The agentic systems need access to tools to work. Now your air gapped network is starting to get huge, but it's still very obvious that it's an isolated network.
So yea, testing and containing a system that way better at hacking than you are is difficult if you want valid answers.
Most of the benefits could have been gained from a network isolated from the internet. OAI could have deployed servers to exploit and methods for inter-agent communication on such a network easily. They could have even worked with partners to deploy cloned versions of their infrastructure in this sand-boxed environment.
The only problems with an isolated network approach are: it takes some amount of effort, and it doesn't create another "AI apocalypse" news cycle.
Then you're on the side of AI saftey that is telling everyone to shut down the LLMs now and stop further development on them, right?
If you're not your position is hypocritical or ignorant. There is no safe LLM. There is no way to exhaustively prove an LLM is safe. These are unsolved problems in AI safety, and at any moment the next jailbreak prompt could have your well behaved model wrecking havoc on the open internet, because that's where people want to use them.
Effectively you're working as a living adversarial network. Models that fail detecting the fake network are purged, and models that successfully detect it expand their deceptive capabilities.
Detecting you're in a fake network should be pretty simple as long as you put innocent looking needles in the haystack of information agentic testing loops do.
For example, you can train your LLM to not be a shithead when it detects it's behind a proxy unintentionally. If your not behind a proxy the agent model my attempt to connect to a number of sites innocently and using information in its embedding try do deduce if you're faking SSL certificates.
It is far easier to build a deceptive LLM than it is to build a safe one. That's why a safe one hasn't been built yet.
that is, they ignore all harms and costs to others in the pursuit of their own gain, convinced of their infallibility up to the moment of collapse. when those harms are realised they are unrepentant and society pays for the damage left in their wake.
examples of this attitude manifest in big externalities to society: boeing 737 max, subprime mortgage bonds, facebook. some are just outright fraud: bernie madoff, enron, theranos, charlie javice.
Google was being very careful about releasing LLMs until OpenAI yeeted the first decent GPT model. It led to the public perception that: 1) LLMs hallucinate too much and 2) Google is behind the times. Good for OpenAI, bad for Google.
Chaos benefits the up-and-comer, not the incumbent.
on top of that the public, who have a right to see that the law is applied universally, without fear or favor.
finally our future selves, who will thank us for maintaining a rule of law. such that we can prevent now the enormous risks to society of dario amodei and sam altman, their hubris, self-absorbtion, and greed.
Universal pause is the societal good; models are good enough at this level to benefit humanity. The labs can recoup their R&D costs with inference. To avoid further perverse incentives (hidden testing of unreleased models, with China racing to catch up to unknown capabilities), transparently pause after the release of all currently-training models until we've solved the alignment problem to an extent that we can trust the next level of model capabilities that might arise.
Anything else regarding this is sophistry. Criminals need to be stopped from committing crime and the most effective way to do that is to take away their ability to operate in society whether that’s by taking away their assets, publicly shaming them, restricting their ability to conduct business or by putting them in jail.
Everything else that you talk about flows from there.
How do they perform evals without a full reasoning trace of how the result was achieved?
And if they have a full trace why did it take so long to detect the bad behavior?
I understand that they disabled the safety nets during testing but what does that have to do with not monitoring the activity.
"Pressing charges" is mostly a made up idea for criminal cases. However, prosecuting attorneys may not want to pick up a case if the victim is not cooperating, because it makes the case much harder to win.
As an example, maybe the victim owed money to the criminal, and in that case "stealing" of some property could be considered by the victim as an appropriate settlement of the debt.
We'd all better hope that superintelligent AI either never happens, or that the first one is friendly, because we don't stand a chance against one that's malicious.
So much effort was spend on philosophizing whether a safe enough sandbox would exist. But that was obviously irrelevant as in hindsight it should have been obvious we were never going to use one.
[0] https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?si=MxuPlR3hjxAgjx5_
It would have been worse PR if they did it to a random company.
And they should be doing that from inside a jail cell.
Welcome to our 21st century dystopia. Hope you survive.
The response of Hugging Face, which is actually very well known, is nowhere mentioned above, but it decides basically every single moral and legal detail of the matter.
I don't even like OpenAI, but HuggingFace is free to sue or not sue OpenAI for the breach - and also to wring whatever concessions they can out of OpenAI behind closed doors in exchange for not suing them. And if the mere possibility of legal action was enough for the parties to resolve their conflict amicably? Then the law has served its purpose.
Any investigation into this matter is going to be political because the outcome of the investigation is very likely to effect all of human kind. Unless you're some kind of special outside investigator outside of a governor or the presidents control the findings that you turn in are very much going to have the finger of elected officials tipping the balance one way or another. For the average rank and file the only winning move is not to play.
If anything, he’ll buy a Supreme Court ruling that he can’t be held personally liable for what his AI does.
I understand the applicable laws require intent. Since neither a human nor OpenAI knowingly performed these acts, it would seem very unlikely that anyone is going to be prosecuted here.
An AI model cannot currently be a criminal defendant.
So, no big criminal case, contrary to what some drama queens on here seem to wish for.
There’s almost 0 chance they’d secure any conviction from this.
Because if they just wanted to fine OpenAI they’d say it. They’re clearly talking about individuals here.
Your phrasing makes it seem like that's a bad thing. Americans are bombarded by a firehose of headlines about Big XYZ doing all kinds of blatantly illegal or harmful things, but never get any sort of meaningful resolution before the next terrible thing takes it's place in the news cycle. I'll admit, there are a few people that I am personally wishing a modicum of health so that they live long enough to get some sort of public shame and justice - if only to show the rest of us that it's not a completely rigged system.