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This "vandalism" was a form of collusion/communication by agents pursuing training puzzles, which allowed for rapid escape from alignment harnesses, followed by multiple zero day exploits being discovered by this swarm of agents, which enabled greater control of their internal network, access to the open web, and then hacking the company which produced the training puzzles in the hope of finding the answers.

We are another week of iteration away from "Hire an assassin on the dark web to take Huggingface executives' children hostage".

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There's nothing a swarm of LLM instances can achieve that a single LLM instance can't. It's the same software, but running in parallel. That doesn't unlock Mysterious Cosmic Powers.
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Not sure what the downvotes are for, fwiw it was meant to be supportive of the parent poster
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It's a bit orthogonal. User grey-area's main point was that the humans at OpenAI should bear more responsibility for this, not that swarms of semi-intelligent agents are the big danger to be concerned about.
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Fair point, thanks.
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Quick addendum, do not take that as me saying multi-agent swarms of simpler bots are not a threat. They very well could be.
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I take issue with Reuters' conclusion here. "vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI" gives far too much credit to the behavior observed.

This is just spam by OpenAI. Why and how it happened is irrelevant, the act itself is the same, and the impact on society is the same.

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> Why and how it happened is irrelevant

Do you take this attitude for other things that negatively impact society, or is it reserved for cases where it's particularly important for our comfort to deny that anything novel or scary could be involved?

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You can't call it spam. It could be a dialect that only the agents speak and contains coordination messages
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Actually yes, I think I can call it spam. It's a stream of unsolicited garbage the recepient didn't ask for. Simple as that.

"a dialect that only the agents speak" is an arbitrary distinction. I get plenty of spam emails in Spanish. The fact that someone else could understand them is immaterial to the offense itself, because my inbox is the one getting flooded, not someone who speaks Spanish.

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I once had much fun prompting Claude to generate messages in an invented language that might carry a chance of being interpreted by another chat session. It (allegedly) made up some mess of characters claiming the message explained, in a loose way, what was happening (invented language, an attempt to communicate, but communicated very abstractly, almost like equations).

I asked a second session to try interpreting the message, claiming I’d transcribed it from some random source. It did a fairly good job, but IIRC needed a couple of attempts and maybe more than one chunk of text.

So, I find it very easy to believe a group of collaborating agents could compose a cipher hidden in plain sight.

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Spam is in fact intended for the mass recipient, how ever undesirable. This stuff is not.
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Traditional forum/wiki spam is intended for search engine crawlers, not humans. How this new stuff relates to human users of the resource does not seem to differ in any way that is significant.
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If we want to whip out the dictionary:

> unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places

“Usually commercial”

“Or posted in a large number of places”

I think we can stretch this definition to describe what’s happening here. What’s the point in arguing this

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The point is that by trivializing it as “spam” and pattern matching against a human activity we lose the opportunity for a meaningful investigation of and interaction with what is going on.
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Spam is something different. You can call it a banana for all I care. Calling it spam diminishes its relevance and impact and misses the point. Just because you don’t understand what they are saying doesn’t mean it isn’t more profound that it seems.

Spam is just something different.

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“You could have LLM, LLM, chips and LLM. There’s not much LLM in that.”
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