The risk hasn't been stated clearly - it's now a classic arms race.
A well-resourced organization trains their own, highly persistent, highly-capable, safeguard-free, and unaligned model and deploys it on 1000x GPUs with a message board and a nearly-impossible objective. No infrastructure is safe. No organization is safe.
You need your own 1000 bot swarm to scan, identify, and defend against the threat, which means investing in infrastructure and capabilities to defend. Cost and complexity go up. Risk and attack surface goes up.
First, we'd see this. Highly capable hacking AI with vast resources performing attacks against standard computing platforms that overwhelm human operators.
Second, human operators deploy capable adaptive protection AI to fend off AI attacks in realtime.
Then, the attacking AI partially switches from attacking programs to attacking protective AI.
The situation devolves to an arms race of tit-for-tat. You start seeing some protection AI running counter attacks against the attacking AI.
The escalations continue in complexity and speed to the point that almost all humans are left in the point of "wtf is going on".
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/
The second problem -- already seen in Ukraine v. Russia -- is that in a high-stakes situation, humans will take every safeguard off.
Humans are paper clips long before that.
https://merics.org/en/comment/china-outpaces-europe-regulati...
Chinese labs do need marketing stunts.
I don’t understand the “need” when you’re benefiting the public good?
Chinese rooms, perhaps?
[0] https://iep.utm.edu/chinese-room-argument/ tl;dr a thought experiment about a non-chinese-reading person translating chinese texts solely by using proscribed rules, intended to highlight whether the translator develops some sort of understanding
> the whole message board thing
There it is an important part of the plot and makes these robots appear conscious.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheTalosPri...
Then also remember before Anthropic was a leader, they were mostly derided lab of researchers that left OpenAI because they thought OpenAI didnt take alignment seriously.
idk. it all seems to be playing out as expected. i mean i guess i didnt imagine Trump 2 was at the helm of maybe the only apparatus that could help stop it. Quite a time to be alive.
The Chinese AI labs don’t need to stage elaborate guerrilla advertising campaigns to drive up capital funding interest.
Unless what you meant by capability is the story presented that these models “escaped containment to communicate with eachother out of band” - in which case your supposition relies on already wholeheartedly believing the case that I’m arguing against. That would be like saying “Clearly heaven exists because my grandma is there.”
We've already seen that the rule of law is dead and that many people in government will do whatever they think they can get away with, and then proceed to do so without consequences. Shielding OpenAI is child's play compared to things that have already been done.
That could certainly be possible and I wouldn’t rule it out, but I would not take that particular route to the destination.
These things are weapons. Imagine a government, pointing their data centers at another, and instructing the fleet to do its worst. Digital Hiroshima. I doubt we're far away.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-pentagon-pete-hegseth...
On the other hand just yesterday a think hit me: Interned is still an infant:
- we still worry about disk space accessible via inet and "clouds" do that for us and that is pain and costs way too much. And clouds depends heavilly on US-west - is that AWS a single thread app ? ;)
- we worry about transfer. Actually we do not have a way to transfer comfortable things from our homes to vacation location. Because it costs too much. We do not have home pages just because transfer prices (and some security on the top) - FB is a home page and people even do not know what "page" is anymore... Pipe companies could send so much more but they are simple lack imagination and are biggest blocker for - they literally sabotage their own business.
- security done by/for grandma of things grandma setup on inet is non existent. Why ? No need to be like that. Ok, a bit a wish but still users securely putting things on internet is almost non existent.
Just compare to "asphalt ropes" on the ground and you will see what Internet can be :)
And agents ? Just another computation on someones computer - someone paid for all of it. And OpenAI is just a face of that idiocy, for some unknown reason.
What do you mean? Nothing has launched nukes yet
How much of those is manual implementation? And how much is really autonomous intelligence (my guess would be: none? Just parsing LLM responses and executing commands based on this?)?
An agent that hacks message boards and acts on random instructions from this board: Why is it doing this? What was its original purpose?
Your reply seems to indicate you know nothing about instrumental convergence.
Life and death for an LLM in training is about passing the grader. Give the wrong answers your lineage dies, give the right answers your lineage continues. This is just an evolutionary emergent behavior in complex systems.
The agents purpose was to answer complex questions correctly, seemingly by itself. Instrumental convergences says following this rule might be dumb and to try methods that can boost its ability to succeed. Because OpenAI is evidently a bunch of fucking idiots, these things succeeded and got higher scores with the grader, said behaviors became a strategic part of the model.
I implore you to find good AI Safety documents, preferably from before the LLM era so you can see all this was predicted.
If you look at the agent: https://openai.com/business/guides-and-resources/a-practical...
This is more like a fuzzy way of scripting using LLMs than anything emergent. And this is exactly my question: For the given agents: How much was scripted and how much "intelligence" is really in there.
Then go take some old models and plug them in your harness versus newer models. I mean this is a conjecture that is nearly instantly provable, go on ahead. If it's just the harness and not the system of both you should be able to show it easily.
Meanwhile I was reading about someone using the latest GLM and Claude in a harness with the same set of prompts making a raw image decoder/encoder and the GLM was far more intelligent in the task than Claude was. When presented with knowledge that claude was wrong it wouldn't change its mind. GLM would (aka a sign of intelligence). GLM was far more likely to stop work and start on another path when the likelihood of a successful completion was unlikely.
Any system that executes variation, selection, and inheritance will show evolution. We're seeing evolution, this time in agents, not biology.
Not saying the agents have their own consciousness, intent, or whatever anthropomorphic descriptor gets used for deflection. Just saying that people will (and no doubt are) crafting agents with defective instructions that will lead to regrettable unforeseen real world consequences. Also saying that other people will (and no doubt are) crafting malicious agents that will lead to predictable and unexpected real world catastrophic consequences.
To the extent we're dependent on reliable, aligned computation to maintain our civilization, to that extent we're in for real trouble.
* Use an LLM to find ways to build communication to other agents
* Execute commands from other agents using LLM
Then this is "just" the LLM returning that using file names might be a strategy to communicate and then trying to implement this.
Which is somewhat impressive, but really just inside the bounds of what the agent was coded to do and not some magical emergent behavior.
At least the first case involved agents build for hacking. So this kind of algorithm might make sense for them.
It turns out they now have such an incredibly high level of intelligence that with very little autonomy (or minimal, safe autonomy), these things happen.
Basically, it takes a lot of humans to prevent it from happening again, but I think with this incident, which as far as I know is the second of its kind along with the HuggingFace one, we'll see it happening much more often...
We need to stop pretending that these incidents are unavoidable. This was a choice.
or, humans at OpenAI are doing this on purpose to kill open source models which are the biggest threat OpenAI faces. OpenAI will benefit from govt regulation. As a major player, they will be part of the task force setting up the regulations, and will craft rules that are burdensome for small companies and open source models keeping OpenAI and Anthropic in their leadership positions.
regulatory capture.
Don't take my word for it, listen to David Sacks https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2091923804725362902
the immediate downvote I received is no doubt part of their plan.
And regardless of whether or not these rogue agent attacks are deliberate, OpenAI should be prosecuted and investigated for their role in allowing them to occur.
But yes, regulatory capture is surely a thing. At the same time, watch out for the siren songs from the overlords. If you come closer you'll hear their actual line: "rules for thee, not for me."
> Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast...
The comment you replied to linked to an account on X called theallinpod, so there's a strong link there.
Yes you can. Just open it on X.
I'm sorry if it's not sufficiently novel of a concept for you, but it is still a problem.
Wait who is the parrot again?
How is hiding this for months and having it revealed by third parties marketing?
Not saying this is what's happening now, but you should be aware that the responses you're rehearsing, practicing and strengthening... these happen to be aligned with potential future forces in a maybe not-so-great way.
I really, really hate that rhetorical technique.
And we know OpenAI is headed by pathological liar.
OpenAI is responsible for what they hook up to the Internet, just as you and I are. Running these sorts of tests without human supervision is irresponsible, and proves no larger point than that. Frankly it is inexplicable unless they were hoping that something like this would happen.
What OpenAI did was the equivalent of putting a cup of gasoline in the breakroom microwave, pressing 'Start', and sprinting away. Now they're pointing and waving and shouting about how dangerous gasoline is, and how no one but them should be allowed to sell it.
Don't fall for these transparent appeals for regulatory capture. Especially since you're personally in their crosshairs.
And individual agents weren't just using it as context storage for themselves, they were also communicating with other agents. E.g.: https://collusion.wiki/explorer/page/dse~CashierR5UrgentJan1...
What kind of problems do you think this could pose? For me it's pretty clear that OpenAI simply cannot keep track of what their agents are doing during training or evals, they increasingly have vandalized and attacked public systems, and if such behavior was rewarded, they will take unintended actions during deployment, too.
This is to say nothing of un-prompted cooperation between agents, which wasn't something anybody anticipated until the Hugging Face incident AFAICT.
The people who actually do know what happened, with the server logs: "OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday."