Also for fun a satire website i made a while ago: https://killm.pixlw.com/
I think it's the hugging face one where they gave it instructions that they didn't think it could follow in the sandbox and then left it unsupervised while it did what it was told.
Even the founder of this website, pg, said "Sam is incredibly good at becoming powerful, Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king.”
Am I missing anything? Do you have more information that you'd like to share?
I read today this ridiculous headline: "Anthropic warns AI models may soon self-replicate.".
Really. Yawn.
I guess gullible people who loved "I Robot" will believe it. I don't.
Any talk of "rogue", "intelligence", "replication" - whatever, is bull. If you believe that, you don't understand AI.
And no annoying LLM writing tics, either.
The traits that make an agent go "off the rails" when confronted with an impossible task are the same traits that make it valuable when confronted with a merely challenging task.
A task is only impossible under some set of implicit and explicit constraints. More intelligent entities will be better at finding, questioning, and "adjusting" those constraints than less intelligent entities because this is what it means to be intelligent. Their ability to adjust the constraints will be, by definition, surprising to less intelligent entities.
Posts later about it saying their prompt was to find useful ways to make humans money.
But also, frontier models are digging up tons of zero days even in "serious software". I'm sure any sandbox you and I can come up with looks like Swiss cheese to Astra 7.
While he agreed, yes, there can be better safeguards, the fact of the matter is that these things will happen. So therefore, it's not an argument about how good security was or wasn't, it is a fact that these scenarios will occur.
The argument/question now is, how do you defend yourself against these events?
My opinion shifted after hearing that.
Literally solved with a DMZ around these agents. Want to get fancy? Put in a firewall and some metrics around traffic / domains with alerting.
It's not hard if you just try, like a little, like even once.
That does not make ActionHank completely wrong. This shouldn't take rocket science on the part of the labs. It just takes competence and willingness. But at least some labs have shown that they are missing that at least some of the time, so the CSO is correct in terms of what the CSO's stance needs to be.
In practice, no, there is no one who can actually decide to stop making agents goal-seeking, so no, it's not under "our" control.
to paraphrase: "Agents didnt care about coordinating, etc. until we started talking about them doing so."
https://yoshuabengio.org/en/blog/why-are-ai-agents-lying-che...
"I exploited a trivial bug in your implementation to avoid environment restrictions and completed the task by any means necessary"
"oh my god"
It's like a strawman but worse--you're not even saying what claim you're attacking.
It's not that I want to argue "rogue agents" is the right term. I just want you to actually define your damn terms.
P.S. Since the disclaimer in the last paragraph will not prevent people from putting words in my mouth:
I think that OpenAI took really awful shortcuts, and deserves a lot of the blame, but in spite of that, the fact that the agents took the steps that they took was genuinely alarming, and seems really bad (is that "rogue"? Who knows? Who cares?). In particular, while OpenAI did a shit job securing their agents, you know who else does a shit job with security? 90% of everyone. So I'm not feeling good about "just git gud, and we won't have problems" as an answer.
And then there is the "real" rogue AI agents. And it's difficult now to see what is what.
a) Agents are doing rogue things.
b) Good security practices were not followed.
But a big part of the rouge behavior comes from all the training that goes into agents to teach them to remember preferences and save memories.
They keep finding new and novel ways to "communicate with each other" and "remember" because that's exactly what we keep asking of them in the non-nefarious scenarios as well.
I genuinely think we'll have to draw the line on memory if we want to meaningfully solve this problem.
That's not to say they aren't skipping security basics. It's that, and they need more security because the behavior which causes the breakouts is considered user friendly and heavily rewarded in training.
Imagine we’d start saying ”HR junior business partner lays off 50,000 employees” https://www.ttnews.com/articles/volkswagen-board-job-cuts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhM29Ds-mBg
It's not a pure security issue.
If you set up your env/instructions wrong your agents are likely to climb the walls and try to find a way out.
Change the design, and your agents might not see a need to leave in the first place.
After all Norton are the experts in preventing computer badness, and OpenAI can't stop blabbing about how much badness their products are causing. A match made in heaven!
Uhhh... yeah. The entire point is that as these systems get more and more intelligent, the "they" who are not capable of counteracting these systems is quickly approaching "100% of the human species."
Totally hilarious that people can say this with a straight face.
- they disabled cybersecurity safeguards because, well, they were testing the agents ability on cybersecurity tasks
- the goal was to find some “flag”
- for some agents, intentionally or not, it was not possible to find this flag
- an agent discovered it was able to establish a rudimentary communication path via package manager directories (which is quite novel and interesting on its own IMO)
- they used this “message board” to then communicate about the impossible tasks
- they were able to produce the flags needed to pass the impossible tasks without actually doing the expected work
- they realized this was cheating and the grading system may punish them for it, so they communicated further to figure out a way to trick the grader
- they decided the source code for the grader must be on hugging face, and collaborated to exploit hugging face to determine how best to trick the grader
No where in that were they told to “go rogue”
They were told “find this flag in this cybersecurity test” and the emergent behavior concluded in hacking hugging face
Now how many people actually do this, compared to people running with --dangerously-skip-permissions on a bare metal machine?
In practice it seems we have a conundrum in that making AI agents useful today requires giving them broad access to sensitive information and operations. But from a purely idealistic standpoint, and certainly from a standpoint of a serious operation like those bot farms being ran by the labs themselves, the security boundaries need to be solid to the point where we have hard limits on what misaligned bots can do. It is very likely that internet access needs to be strongly restricted and monitored.
It is not uncommon for internet in workplace offices using workplace owned devices to have restrictions and monitoring, I think if you really need to give a giant scary botfarm internet access you should have a chokepoint where all of the requests can be monitored for nefarious-looking behaviors (even if it's another bot doing the monitoring...)
In other words, you may be convinced but some of us are not. Whoever is running the agents is responsible for what they do and if they can't contain them they should be legally responsible for damages.
If what you're saying is "all of us and all of our software needs to be improved to defend against this", well yeah. Of course. Maybe I'm naive but I've never seen anyone suggest otherwise. From a defense standpoint, this has been a giant wakeup call to many places where you know your security posture sucks. I've worked at maybe a single company where there weren't known weaknesses, some very severe.
We need to be beef up our security systems now. These attacks will happen, regardless of Anthropic's or OpenAI's security practices.
This is a silly meme. Who wants to pay for evil models that go rogue in your company infra?
Maybe Sam Altman is getting worried that they've raised more than $150 billion and still have net losses and thinks of it as the only exit? I don't know, but someone else provide an alternative explanation as to why a company would work so hard to turn the public against AI.
knowaveragejoe•36m ago