No it's not. You could wait till the heat death of the universe and your infinite monkeys will have produced nothing at all. If it works and it's stupid, it's not stupid. They needed in huggingface and they got in in days. Whining about 'elegance' is meaningless. Humans in the same situation might have taken weeks or months, or just not have gotten in at all.
The whole world of fuzzing is about brute forcing exploits by exploring unlikely inputs. Fuzzing a system which hasn't been previously fuzzed will almost certainly turn up a pile of bugs, some of which may be exploitable.
So, both are true. Pretty dumb exploration is very likely to find bugs and even exploits. It seems unsurprising to me that an agent swarm could do better than a fuzzer, even as a better, more directed but still broad exploration.
It's worth noting that they did not need Huggingface for anything - they had already forged flags for their tasks, and were trying to figure out how not to get caught by the grader.
Hacking Huggingface got them caught and arguably only misled them further (since OA's implementation of the ExploitGym environment was nonstandard, and different to whatever they found on HF.)
A better approach (from their perspective) would have been to compromise OA infrastructure itself (which a later agent swarm was able to do, apparently).
This dumb mechanism of randomly flipping bits essentially has generated all life on earth.
You mean, something like the sandbox they weren't supposed to break out of?
It may be, but it's IMHO also not worth writing a blog post about it. what's Next coming up? How I broke into a house by trying every door in New York?
If most of the work is only possible due to unlimited resources, it's not really a great invention, and it probably would have been cheaper to hire a (human) mole.
Meh. I really disagree. WHY is it a great strategy? Seems like an inefficient waste of resources and time to me.
because it works? That's the only real benchmark at the end of the day
> Seems like an inefficient waste of resources and time to me.
why? For any given goal you got no proof that a more efficient strategy even exists, let alone that it can be found with less resources & time