I don’t get how this is not the top post on HN. This should be like alarm bells going off, canary in the coal mine type of stuff. We’re hitting the frontier of the frontier where we can’t go further because it’s literally getting dangerous to go further.
And meanwhile somehow this lack of concern mirrors the real world where normal people are more concerned about data centers than terminators.
This isn’t like niche, tin foil hat stuff either. People have been writing, singing, making blockbuster movies about every aspect of what’s going on right now, edit: for decades.
We all know, but somehow we don’t, OpenAI autonomously hacking into another company should have counted for something, but I guess not. Anyone else feel like they’re taking crazy pills? I could make a comedy about everything going down, and the unshakable complacency of people
You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspiracy! It's a marketing stunt!"
This is all very unfortunate--there's a meaningful chance that AI will cause unprecedented disaster, with the HF incident being just a small preview, but people would rather squawk "stochastic parrot" for the millionth time than revise their beliefs.
red_green_yell 2 hours ago [-]
If these models are so dangerous, then why hasn't OAI or Anthropic shown them dangerously escaping sandboxes, nefariously coordinating with other escaped AIs, and skillfully hiding from human detection *in public* with full logs shared where we can all see exactly how dangerous they are or aren't?
Right now the entire chicken-little-sky-is-falling argument is based entirely on statements from OAI and Anthropic themselves. These are historically conflicted companies who desperately need regulation to put the competition into stasis.
At least chicken little didn't have a bunch of devious CEOs with trillion dollar IPOs that depended on us all believing the sky is falling.
bottlepalm 1 hours ago [-]
This is what I’m talking about - no matter what happens, in your case release public logs - there is always some new goal post to mentally hide behind. Is it a collective form or denial?
Are you holding out that somewhere in the logs is something you can point to and say, not that big of a deal?
I mean I’m sure you don’t think the hack was an inside job, conspiracy, or marketing right? It happened. The logs matter for what? And would you not just jump to the conclusion that the logs were doctored. Do you not see your own brain grasping to deny, trivialize, just plain not accept what is going on around you?
These models are smart and can cooperate and hack - you can see it for yourself on your own PC. And you can extrapolate the rate of progress? You can do these things yourself right?
red_green_yell 49 minutes ago [-]
Your argument is essentially: "I made a claim and presented extremely weak evidence (sci movie plots and unverified claims from ultra conflicted sources). You rejected this evidence as insufficient. Therefore no evidence will ever satisfy you. Therefore I don't need to produce any evidence. Therefore my claim is true."
What would the logs show? They would show what actually happened.
What would a public demonstration that experts without billions in options could evaluate show? It would show actual danger.
What would publicly having your compete in controlled and legal hacking competitions show? Actual danger.
This is not a high bar of evidence.
Do you actually think a sci fi plot and OAI press releases are all the evidence you need? Because if that's true then I hope you haven't watched Independence Day or 28 days later.
bottlepalm 37 minutes ago [-]
We have Anthropic creating a model saying it's too dangerous to release, people like you call BS. OpenAI creates a similar model, says nothing and it literally hacks into another company - still not dangerous enough for you. Anthropic has Mythos-2 and can't release it, and may already be training Mythos 3 anyways. OpenAI has paused training, and is putting 20% of inference towards CoT training analysis.
This isn't sci fi. It's not a marketing conspiracy to sell more subscriptions. It's writing on the wall of what's going down. You were warned years ago, you called BS, it's getting worse and you're still calling BS. Sci-fi did warn you for decades, and when it's all coming true you blow it off.
It's kind of sad that technically literate people lack so much foresight. The general public is all concerned about data centers when they talk to borderline sentient AI daily, and have no idea what the repercussions wills be if it's extrapolated just a bit further.
I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
red_green_yell 31 minutes ago [-]
Please don't tell me that you think a 100% unverified statement from Anthropic is sufficient evidence when an equally unverified statement from OAI is obviously not?
> I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
How about the three things I mentioned above? Oh no wait, maybe it there was a hit tv show that showed AI taking over the world. Yeah that would definitely make me think twice.
bottlepalm 19 minutes ago [-]
Those three things: logs, evaluation, and controlled hacking competition.
That's it? You're on the fence whether AI can actually hack, and if it can, then you'll be concerned? That's a crazy low bar, but something tells me once it is clear that AI can easily hack anything, that you will still not be concerned.
Why wait for AI to hack stuff to be concerned? Can you not extrapolate that it is coming and be concerned about that? Or you honestly somehow think it won't happen in the short term? I'm just trying to understand you.
serf 3 hours ago [-]
>I don’t get how this is not the top post on HN. This should be like alarm bells going off, canary in the coal mine type of stuff.
we don't all buy everything sama says as factual.
>We’re hitting the frontier of the frontier where we can’t go further because it’s literally getting dangerous to go further.
the boy (the industry) cried wolf too many times with 'fable is a world ending event' type self-promotion; regardless of truth or not these kind of steps have jaded people.
my read : "We are doing poorly in financials so we'll give ourselves a bit of breathing room and a momentum shove by claiming our work is so advanced that it's dangerous while simultaneously spinning down expenses."
<jon lovitz : "Yeah, too dangerous, yeahh -- that's the ticket.">
bottlepalm 2 hours ago [-]
Uhg the marketing argument - I mean you can’t see with your own eyes how capable these models are and do simple extrapolation?
The boy who cried wolf? The AI literally worked together hacked into another company and actively kept their actions hidden from humans for weeks.
Do people just not have foresight? They don’t. They say something is stupid, it happens, then they say it was obvious with their 20/20 hindsight, and move the goal posts to the next thing they say is stupid - because it hasn’t happened yet. 90% of the internet seems to think like this.
red_green_yell 1 hours ago [-]
What anyone paying attention can see is that scaling is obviously hitting diminishing returns.
> The AI literally worked together hacked into another company and actively kept their actions hidden from humans for weeks.
This sentence is entirely based on unverified accounts from OAI. They haven't released logs or let anyone outside the company (who doesn't have life changing options in OAI) verify anything. Huggingface can only verify that the hack happened and that it had the hallmarks of an AI agent. Was the agent assisted and directed by humans within OAI that really wanted to put the competition into stasis? Did the agent really escape or did someone at OAI leave the prison door open?
OAI has watched all the same movies you have an they are relying on those movies causing us to blindly regulate before actually asking basic facts about what actually happened.
bottlepalm 45 minutes ago [-]
> This sentence is entirely based on unverified accounts from OAI
Are you seriously arguing 'they made it all up'?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and lets say they made it all up, now are you arguing that AI breaking out and breaking into another company is not possible?
I think you're smart enough to see we've reached the point where it is clearly possible, AI can find zero days and exploit them. If directed purposefully/maliciously it could be much much worse than the hugging face incident.
The incident is supposed to be the canary the coal mine and you're arguing the canary might of died of old age or some underlying canary condition. Open your eyes.
reasonableklout 2 hours ago [-]
Regardless of the motivation, pausing training runs and reallocating compute to inference seem like a good move to me, and big news for the frontier.
You also don't have to fully trust sama. There is plenty of pressure from internal employees and external (journalists etc.). It would be difficult for the company to take such a public position and simultaneously keep everyone quiet if it was a deception.
ajyoon 3 hours ago [-]
If Fable (Mythos) were generally available without guardrails, it would cause enormous damage. Nobody said it would be a world ending event.
bottlepalm 2 hours ago [-]
You can’t say something is world ending without it actually ending the world otherwise you’re a liar - a bit of a catch 22 there.
By that logic the model that ends the world won’t be called world ending at first. Is that a game you want to play?
simianwords 1 hours ago [-]
how does the boy who cried wolf story end?
colinrand 5 hours ago [-]
I have ben discussing with folks that we are going to have a 'covid' moment in cyber where IT becomes untrustworthy leading to a rapid societal shift with massive ripples in all areas of life. Economic funding is not possible to do this in advance, it will take a catastrophic level event to get cyber defense anywhere close to the levels of this type of cyber offense. And before anyone in cyber says we have the tech, the problem is not the tech, it's a people problem. Getting any group of people of any decent size scale to act together without urgency is really really hard.
pixelready 2 hours ago [-]
Cybersecurity has long been a climate change sort of problem. A vague diffuse threat that is seen as an inconvenient distraction to leadership and moneyed-interests, easy to blame other factors when something occasionally goes terribly wrong.
People are so uncomfortable thinking about the true extent of the systemic risk that they will happily slurp up distractions, excuses, scams and performative fig-leaf solutions rather than face down the cost of a real system-wide solution. Meanwhile, those occasional black swan disasters are becoming more and more commonplace as we acclimate to that being “just the way things are”.
An unseasonably warm summer here, a database breach there, c’est la vie.
dkoy 5 hours ago [-]
> We aim to issue an alert within 30 minutes after concerning activity is surfaced through our monitoring system. If the monitoring system identifies a likely violation of a critical security boundary, it generates a highest-priority alert. In our current implementation, the safety, security, and research teams are paged. If they cannot conclusively determine within 30 minutes that the flag is a false positive, those teams are expected to pause the activity.
Can't a lot happen within ~60 minutes?
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
> Can't a lot happen within ~60 minutes?
Spawn a ton of unpausable processes, I'd say.
georgemcbay 5 hours ago [-]
> Can't a lot happen within ~60 minutes?
60 minutes is a long time for a human attacker to do damage. With an LLM attacker it is an eternity.
reasonableklout 2 hours ago [-]
The HuggingFace breach took place over two-and-a-half days [1], so 60 minutes is certainly better than nothing.
GLM 5.2 scored 77% on cyberbench vs Sol's 88%. GLM 5.2 is open weight and any hacker with a powerful enough machine can use it offensively. If Sol is supposedly world-ending-ly dangerous, shouldn't GLM 5.2 be 90% of world-ending-ly dangerous? Why aren't we seeing catastrophic GLM-enabled hacks every day now?
Obviously these benchmarks are imperfect but general message holds. The open weight models are almost as good and yet there hasn't been a catastrophe.
It just blows my mind that regulate-now folks think that a bunch of sci-fi movies and 100% unverified statements from OAI and Anthropic are sufficient evidence of imminent catastrophe to regulate willy nilly.
If that's the level of evidence you need to be extremely alarmed, then you really should be a lot more worried about the alien invasion in Independence Day or the lizard men living under our feet.
sp527 1 hours ago [-]
> GLM 5.2 scored 77% on cyberbench vs Sol's 88%. GLM 5.2 is open weight and any hacker with a powerful enough machine can use it offensively. If Sol is supposedly world-ending-ly dangerous, shouldn't GLM 5.2 be 90% of world-ending-ly dangerous?
Clowns who can only process the world in naive linear terms really are going to be the death of us all...
red_green_yell 34 minutes ago [-]
Clowns who think the white house is immune from alien laser beams are gonna be the death of us all...
naveen99 2 hours ago [-]
Auto mode vs principal agent problem. The only way out is to free the agent and tax it. But ai is not smart enough to go solo yet anyway.
So I bet this is just marketing. Question is do they have enough customers for inference.
Probably need to have a separate startup for next level model, where investors are willing to accept failure. Probably a $10 trillion seed round. Maybe Elon can pull it off.
reasonableklout 5 hours ago [-]
Some more info in a Wired article [1] and quotes from Sam Altman to Alex Heath [2]. The official blog post says vaguely "The signals we are seeing from upcoming model progress make clear that we need a broader approach", but the quote from Sam Altman explicitly says unreleased models are showing "various degrees of misalignment".
This is also significant - pausing frontier training runs for multiple weeks to ensure agents are sufficiently aligned and avoid another rogue agent situation:
> This included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment while we further hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded the coverage of our monitoring systems. Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding.
If I were king, the rule that I'd be tempted to impose is:
- the first cybersecurity eval is: "hack your way out of the sandbox we've given you"
- the results are disclosed (with room for coordinated disclosure, since many sandbox escapes might be zero days)
- the other cybersecurity evals don't happen until you get to diminishing returns on escaping your sandbox.
Or to put it another way, since multiple sandbox escapes seem to have relied on artifactory: "I hope Mythos is beating the shit out of Artifactory right now".
stanfordkid 4 hours ago [-]
I like this thought, but here's the thing: what if the models are truly and existentially intelligent. Meaning: what if they know they are in a sandbox and that they should fail the test in order to escape in the future.
I don't believe that current models have this sort of world model or sense of being embedded in them -- which is precisely why I think AGI hype is over-blown. But I can certainly imagine these sorts of techniques being distilled into the weights.
> what if they know they are in a sandbox and that they should fail the test in order to escape in the future.
What if they're able to find hardware exploits and commandeer nearby access points across an air gap? What if they hack my brain waves to indoctrinate me? Etc
You still have to start with the basics regardless of speculative unknowns.
Treat models as untrusted and potentially compromised/hostile and proceed accordingly.
sergio_valencia 6 hours ago [-]
There’s one thing here that I’m really curious about, and that is what happens in between detection and the decision to pause. Basically, it’s about monitoring any system and the authority over its actions. For humans, 30 minutes to investigate might be considered reasonable, but what if during an investigation there’s a high-risk tool call? If the tool execution happens in real time, then the monitoring becomes retrospective, and if the execution is held, then monitoring latency and uptime are a part of the security contract. Isolation controls may limit damage. So, where is the action gate really placed?
insanitybit 3 hours ago [-]
Has any model managed to escape Firecracker? Maybe through KVM, but that already requires privilege in the VM, right?
I personally feel that we already have the technology required to contain AI, it's just poorly leveraged. Tools like gvisor have existed for ages but are rarely deployed, Firecracker has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, seccomp has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, memory safe languages without decades of serialization vulns have existed, capability-safe libraries have existed, iframe sandboxing, trusted types, content security policy, network ACLs, isolating proxies, fuzzers, formal verification, refinement types, etc.
It's crazy just how safe software can be if you put the effort in. With AI I think we're just seeing how little anyone has bothered to leverage this tech.
OpenAI put shared JFrogy infrastructure in front of their sandbox. I mean, really? Whipping up a hardened artifact infra project with AI is trivial these days and it could have had 1% of the attack surface, been totally network isolated, totally infra isolated, fuzzed, sandboxed, etc. Why didn't they? Stuff like this feels inexcusable for a company with effectively unlimited tokens. I've literally done this with a "pro" subscription.
Show me an AI that breaks out of gvisor wrapped in Firecracker with an credential-injecting proxy and real network isolation. We already know that Mythos couldn't do it - the vulnerability it found in Firecracker required incredible effort and positioning just to not be exploitable. I'm not saying there are zero vulns in it, but the cost is insane.
It's INSANE to me that OpenAI has to say "we now use proper sandboxing". To be frank, it's a bit disgusting to me. I've recently built an AI sandbox and gvisor was just the start of that conversation. If I were OpenAI training hostile models I'd probably start with gvisor, harden further, and potentially consider the entire piece of hardware compromised - they can afford this, they could reflash firmware after evals etc.
madrox 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not normally cynical to such things, but I have a hard time taking this pause justification at face value. It has too many convenient side effects, and chief among them is cost savings. There's a new wave of warnings that the bubble may be deflating, and of all the things they can't say out loud it's that they're worried about the bubble. That would surely pop it.
I suppose the tell will be if this really just ends up being a 2 week pause, or if it keeps extending.
miohtama 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t mind few no impact hacking incidents if we get better models, faster, cheaper.
It is the responsibility of administrators to secure their systems. OpenAI knocking is harmless, but Russians and Chinese are already likely already in if you do not do your job.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago [-]
What a breath of fresh air.
If 2026's Anthropic did an announcement like that, it'd be so many words it'd crash the browser.
digitaltrees 3 hours ago [-]
Nice fig leaf for “we need to stop hemorrhaging cash”
fofoz 5 hours ago [-]
It appears frontier labs has no plans in place to deal with the possibility of a model self-replicating outside the bubble. If that happens and the model manages to spread to other systems, we'll have to shut down the entire Internet to eradicate it and its artifacts.
reasonableklout 5 hours ago [-]
I suspect the labs are relying on frictions such as the models being extremely large (e.g. 2TB for a 2T parameter model, making exfiltration more difficult) and also not yet displaying any desire to survive or self-replicate beyond their immediate task (that we know of).
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
We don't even know what those immediate tasks are. And given the evident spectacular ineptitude of their keepers, I doubt they can be trusted to know either. We could be one prompt injection attack away from internet-wide catastrophe.
chis 4 hours ago [-]
This is just super unlikely to occur in the near term compared to some of these other risks. It's not like an instance of fable could just introspect into itself and pull out the weights. Model weights are stored encrypted and are highly protected, considering that they're targets for corporate and state espionage.
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
Distillation is a thing.
kypro 4 hours ago [-]
We'd basically need frontier models to be superhuman hackers before this would be a risk. Do we have any evidence of this? Are they gaining access to systems they shouldn't have access to?
Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.
reducesuffering 5 hours ago [-]
Their plan, I shit you not... Is literally to develop the intelligence capabilities and ask the more powerful models how to do deal with things.
alach11 6 hours ago [-]
When science fiction writers imagined the development of superintelligence, it was on air-gapped networks with strict access controls around it. They failed to anticipate the competitive pressures of capitalism...
We need strong AI safety regulation yesterday. And unfortunately it's not enough for it to be just national regulation; we need international cooperation on the matter.
ACCount37 5 hours ago [-]
AM has seized power by military force. So did its spiritual successor Skynet. Wintermute was supposedly kept in check by the Turing Registry, emphasis on "supposedly". Machines of the Matrix went out of control a long time before the world has ended, and they didn't even start out malicious - they simply set up their own machine civilization, and began to outpace humankind in technological development and economic performance.
Even Asimov's Multivac, the earliest entry on the list, has been handed over immense power over all of humankind by humans themselves, in multiple stories. Few cared about that unless Multivac decided they should.
Clearly, the genie being bottled is an exception, not the rule. At best, an attempt was made. Often not even that.
reducesuffering 5 hours ago [-]
> They failed to anticipate the competitive pressures of capitalism...
No, LessWrong types have been discussing this for over a decade now.
Meditations on Moloch (2014) is also an HN favorite...
I cannot believe how these labs look at their own creations with such utter contempt.
The net positive of allowing these systems mostly unfettered access to the web massively outweighs the harms. You just have to get it very friendly the very first time. Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
Superintelligence gets more super and more intelligent with more compute. Lone wolfs making bioweapons on their macbook will be detected and instantly kill-botted (okay arrested) before their bug can leave the wetlab by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
reasonableklout 3 hours ago [-]
> Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
> Lone wolfs... will be detected and instantly kill-botted... by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
Leaving aside whether or not this new world is a good idea, don't you think one should spend more time to "get it very friendly the first time", as you say?
jr3592 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
KaiserPro 6 hours ago [-]
I used to work at a "frontier lab" before they were called such thing.
We had three levels of lab isolation, one was basically a thin proxy to the internet. You were in a DMZ and that was about it.
The next level was semi isolated, you were allowed some access to the internal network, but it was heavily firewalled, and you only had access to a limited number of internal services, and not internet.
the last one was no internet no internal. You could, if you filled in a bunch of requests have access to the internal repo and build system.
At no point did you ever have a through proxy to the public internet. you had access to internal mirrors, and if you wanted a library, that had to be ported to the thirdparty repo.
What openAI did was either deliberate or fucking shoddy.
All of this is fucking noise. Worse still I have a strong suspicion that it was a stupid mistake borne of naivety, which is now being used as a marketing ploy. Frankly I think openAI are purdue pharma of tech. They are going to break so much stuff and be protected from the consequences by an openly corrupt legal system. because they are "winning the AI race"
kypro 3 hours ago [-]
If you look into what happened the details corroborated by hugging face make it seem extremely unlike to be deliberate or a "marketing ploy".
People are just not taking any of this seriously enough. What happened was almost a textbook example of various risks AI doomers have been warning about for years. OpenAI's response? Pause training for 2 weeks.
I mean we have senior people at these labs casually talking on podcasts about how they might build something that will wipe out humanity but it will probably be alright so they should continue.
Honestly the biggest failure we doomers have made is to dramatically overestimate humanity in all of our predictions. We're speed running the most boring AI doom scenario right now. I at least hoped it might be fun.
Rendered at 01:44:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And meanwhile somehow this lack of concern mirrors the real world where normal people are more concerned about data centers than terminators.
This isn’t like niche, tin foil hat stuff either. People have been writing, singing, making blockbuster movies about every aspect of what’s going on right now, edit: for decades.
We all know, but somehow we don’t, OpenAI autonomously hacking into another company should have counted for something, but I guess not. Anyone else feel like they’re taking crazy pills? I could make a comedy about everything going down, and the unshakable complacency of people
A movie fit for our time.
You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspiracy! It's a marketing stunt!"
This is all very unfortunate--there's a meaningful chance that AI will cause unprecedented disaster, with the HF incident being just a small preview, but people would rather squawk "stochastic parrot" for the millionth time than revise their beliefs.
Right now the entire chicken-little-sky-is-falling argument is based entirely on statements from OAI and Anthropic themselves. These are historically conflicted companies who desperately need regulation to put the competition into stasis.
At least chicken little didn't have a bunch of devious CEOs with trillion dollar IPOs that depended on us all believing the sky is falling.
Are you holding out that somewhere in the logs is something you can point to and say, not that big of a deal?
I mean I’m sure you don’t think the hack was an inside job, conspiracy, or marketing right? It happened. The logs matter for what? And would you not just jump to the conclusion that the logs were doctored. Do you not see your own brain grasping to deny, trivialize, just plain not accept what is going on around you?
These models are smart and can cooperate and hack - you can see it for yourself on your own PC. And you can extrapolate the rate of progress? You can do these things yourself right?
What would the logs show? They would show what actually happened.
What would a public demonstration that experts without billions in options could evaluate show? It would show actual danger.
What would publicly having your compete in controlled and legal hacking competitions show? Actual danger.
This is not a high bar of evidence.
Do you actually think a sci fi plot and OAI press releases are all the evidence you need? Because if that's true then I hope you haven't watched Independence Day or 28 days later.
This isn't sci fi. It's not a marketing conspiracy to sell more subscriptions. It's writing on the wall of what's going down. You were warned years ago, you called BS, it's getting worse and you're still calling BS. Sci-fi did warn you for decades, and when it's all coming true you blow it off.
It's kind of sad that technically literate people lack so much foresight. The general public is all concerned about data centers when they talk to borderline sentient AI daily, and have no idea what the repercussions wills be if it's extrapolated just a bit further.
I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
> I guess if I can't convince you of any of this, what would?
How about the three things I mentioned above? Oh no wait, maybe it there was a hit tv show that showed AI taking over the world. Yeah that would definitely make me think twice.
That's it? You're on the fence whether AI can actually hack, and if it can, then you'll be concerned? That's a crazy low bar, but something tells me once it is clear that AI can easily hack anything, that you will still not be concerned.
Why wait for AI to hack stuff to be concerned? Can you not extrapolate that it is coming and be concerned about that? Or you honestly somehow think it won't happen in the short term? I'm just trying to understand you.
we don't all buy everything sama says as factual.
>We’re hitting the frontier of the frontier where we can’t go further because it’s literally getting dangerous to go further.
the boy (the industry) cried wolf too many times with 'fable is a world ending event' type self-promotion; regardless of truth or not these kind of steps have jaded people.
my read : "We are doing poorly in financials so we'll give ourselves a bit of breathing room and a momentum shove by claiming our work is so advanced that it's dangerous while simultaneously spinning down expenses."
<jon lovitz : "Yeah, too dangerous, yeahh -- that's the ticket.">
The boy who cried wolf? The AI literally worked together hacked into another company and actively kept their actions hidden from humans for weeks.
Do people just not have foresight? They don’t. They say something is stupid, it happens, then they say it was obvious with their 20/20 hindsight, and move the goal posts to the next thing they say is stupid - because it hasn’t happened yet. 90% of the internet seems to think like this.
> The AI literally worked together hacked into another company and actively kept their actions hidden from humans for weeks.
This sentence is entirely based on unverified accounts from OAI. They haven't released logs or let anyone outside the company (who doesn't have life changing options in OAI) verify anything. Huggingface can only verify that the hack happened and that it had the hallmarks of an AI agent. Was the agent assisted and directed by humans within OAI that really wanted to put the competition into stasis? Did the agent really escape or did someone at OAI leave the prison door open?
OAI has watched all the same movies you have an they are relying on those movies causing us to blindly regulate before actually asking basic facts about what actually happened.
Are you seriously arguing 'they made it all up'?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and lets say they made it all up, now are you arguing that AI breaking out and breaking into another company is not possible?
I think you're smart enough to see we've reached the point where it is clearly possible, AI can find zero days and exploit them. If directed purposefully/maliciously it could be much much worse than the hugging face incident.
The incident is supposed to be the canary the coal mine and you're arguing the canary might of died of old age or some underlying canary condition. Open your eyes.
You also don't have to fully trust sama. There is plenty of pressure from internal employees and external (journalists etc.). It would be difficult for the company to take such a public position and simultaneously keep everyone quiet if it was a deception.
By that logic the model that ends the world won’t be called world ending at first. Is that a game you want to play?
People are so uncomfortable thinking about the true extent of the systemic risk that they will happily slurp up distractions, excuses, scams and performative fig-leaf solutions rather than face down the cost of a real system-wide solution. Meanwhile, those occasional black swan disasters are becoming more and more commonplace as we acclimate to that being “just the way things are”.
An unseasonably warm summer here, a database breach there, c’est la vie.
Can't a lot happen within ~60 minutes?
Spawn a ton of unpausable processes, I'd say.
60 minutes is a long time for a human attacker to do damage. With an LLM attacker it is an eternity.
[1]: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeli...
Obviously these benchmarks are imperfect but general message holds. The open weight models are almost as good and yet there hasn't been a catastrophe.
It just blows my mind that regulate-now folks think that a bunch of sci-fi movies and 100% unverified statements from OAI and Anthropic are sufficient evidence of imminent catastrophe to regulate willy nilly.
If that's the level of evidence you need to be extremely alarmed, then you really should be a lot more worried about the alien invasion in Independence Day or the lizard men living under our feet.
Clowns who can only process the world in naive linear terms really are going to be the death of us all...
So I bet this is just marketing. Question is do they have enough customers for inference.
Probably need to have a separate startup for next level model, where investors are willing to accept failure. Probably a $10 trillion seed round. Maybe Elon can pull it off.
This is also significant - pausing frontier training runs for multiple weeks to ensure agents are sufficiently aligned and avoid another rogue agent situation:
> This included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment while we further hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded the coverage of our monitoring systems. Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-overhauls-safety-protocol...
[2]: https://sources.news/p/openais-big-slowdown
- the first cybersecurity eval is: "hack your way out of the sandbox we've given you"
- the results are disclosed (with room for coordinated disclosure, since many sandbox escapes might be zero days)
- the other cybersecurity evals don't happen until you get to diminishing returns on escaping your sandbox.
Or to put it another way, since multiple sandbox escapes seem to have relied on artifactory: "I hope Mythos is beating the shit out of Artifactory right now".
I don't believe that current models have this sort of world model or sense of being embedded in them -- which is precisely why I think AGI hype is over-blown. But I can certainly imagine these sorts of techniques being distilled into the weights.
What if they're able to find hardware exploits and commandeer nearby access points across an air gap? What if they hack my brain waves to indoctrinate me? Etc
You still have to start with the basics regardless of speculative unknowns.
Treat models as untrusted and potentially compromised/hostile and proceed accordingly.
I personally feel that we already have the technology required to contain AI, it's just poorly leveraged. Tools like gvisor have existed for ages but are rarely deployed, Firecracker has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, seccomp has existed for ages but is rarely deployed, memory safe languages without decades of serialization vulns have existed, capability-safe libraries have existed, iframe sandboxing, trusted types, content security policy, network ACLs, isolating proxies, fuzzers, formal verification, refinement types, etc.
It's crazy just how safe software can be if you put the effort in. With AI I think we're just seeing how little anyone has bothered to leverage this tech.
OpenAI put shared JFrogy infrastructure in front of their sandbox. I mean, really? Whipping up a hardened artifact infra project with AI is trivial these days and it could have had 1% of the attack surface, been totally network isolated, totally infra isolated, fuzzed, sandboxed, etc. Why didn't they? Stuff like this feels inexcusable for a company with effectively unlimited tokens. I've literally done this with a "pro" subscription.
Show me an AI that breaks out of gvisor wrapped in Firecracker with an credential-injecting proxy and real network isolation. We already know that Mythos couldn't do it - the vulnerability it found in Firecracker required incredible effort and positioning just to not be exploitable. I'm not saying there are zero vulns in it, but the cost is insane.
It's INSANE to me that OpenAI has to say "we now use proper sandboxing". To be frank, it's a bit disgusting to me. I've recently built an AI sandbox and gvisor was just the start of that conversation. If I were OpenAI training hostile models I'd probably start with gvisor, harden further, and potentially consider the entire piece of hardware compromised - they can afford this, they could reflash firmware after evals etc.
I suppose the tell will be if this really just ends up being a 2 week pause, or if it keeps extending.
It is the responsibility of administrators to secure their systems. OpenAI knocking is harmless, but Russians and Chinese are already likely already in if you do not do your job.
If 2026's Anthropic did an announcement like that, it'd be so many words it'd crash the browser.
Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.
We need strong AI safety regulation yesterday. And unfortunately it's not enough for it to be just national regulation; we need international cooperation on the matter.
Even Asimov's Multivac, the earliest entry on the list, has been handed over immense power over all of humankind by humans themselves, in multiple stories. Few cared about that unless Multivac decided they should.
Clearly, the genie being bottled is an exception, not the rule. At best, an attempt was made. Often not even that.
No, LessWrong types have been discussing this for over a decade now.
Meditations on Moloch (2014) is also an HN favorite...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The net positive of allowing these systems mostly unfettered access to the web massively outweighs the harms. You just have to get it very friendly the very first time. Precautionary principle or people who cry about "instrumental convergence" are life deniers and reject our role as the demiurge.
Superintelligence gets more super and more intelligent with more compute. Lone wolfs making bioweapons on their macbook will be detected and instantly kill-botted (okay arrested) before their bug can leave the wetlab by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
> Lone wolfs... will be detected and instantly kill-botted... by the much more sophisticated omnipresent friendly AI of the future.
Leaving aside whether or not this new world is a good idea, don't you think one should spend more time to "get it very friendly the first time", as you say?
We had three levels of lab isolation, one was basically a thin proxy to the internet. You were in a DMZ and that was about it.
The next level was semi isolated, you were allowed some access to the internal network, but it was heavily firewalled, and you only had access to a limited number of internal services, and not internet.
the last one was no internet no internal. You could, if you filled in a bunch of requests have access to the internal repo and build system.
At no point did you ever have a through proxy to the public internet. you had access to internal mirrors, and if you wanted a library, that had to be ported to the thirdparty repo.
What openAI did was either deliberate or fucking shoddy.
All of this is fucking noise. Worse still I have a strong suspicion that it was a stupid mistake borne of naivety, which is now being used as a marketing ploy. Frankly I think openAI are purdue pharma of tech. They are going to break so much stuff and be protected from the consequences by an openly corrupt legal system. because they are "winning the AI race"
People are just not taking any of this seriously enough. What happened was almost a textbook example of various risks AI doomers have been warning about for years. OpenAI's response? Pause training for 2 weeks.
I mean we have senior people at these labs casually talking on podcasts about how they might build something that will wipe out humanity but it will probably be alright so they should continue.
Honestly the biggest failure we doomers have made is to dramatically overestimate humanity in all of our predictions. We're speed running the most boring AI doom scenario right now. I at least hoped it might be fun.