Additionally this is reported:
"The researchers also found efforts to tamper with the website itself. Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, said this amounted to a hacking attempt. OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday."
- Agents wanting to find a venue to communicate their findings to each other
- Objective being to cheat on benchmarks
- Not a single agent sounded the alarm about the operation and alerted a human
Not sure if "cheating" is the right word rather than trying to fulfill the objective(s) (benchmark number) as much as possible?
so the model has some concept of "ethics" but it was overridden by a drive for task completion.
There is no “intent” here, there is pseudo intent. If you are only concerned with outcomes and not the actual nuts and bolts of how those outcomes are achieved, this distinction will be meaningless to you.
If you are actually thinking about what is going on, and what can be done to prevent such outcomes, then assuming there is any such thing as “ethics” results in misaligned assumptions at best, and wasted effort looking in the wrong directions at worst.
If the agents acted based on “ethics” then the solution would be to check the ethics they believe in and change those.
However there is no belief system at play here, simply a simulation which was instantiated in a certain way. Which brings us to the annoying voodoo part of LLM training. Everything goes back to how the initial training data is shaped.
of course OpenAI would say that, "oh, our model is so dangerous, it can hack into anything, be afraid, buy our IPO". it's just fear marketing
> The agents continue to poke around on DSEWiki. A few hours after they find the site, they start probing it for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. [...] The agent swarm starts testing whether they can execute JavaScript that they embed into the search page, and continue to do this for a few days
either the agents were doing free security testing for the site and forgot to submit a report, or they were trying XSS to gain something.
also
> Hijacking: To take control of (something) without permission or authorization and use it for one's own purposes.
a mod had to go through and mass delete a bunch of pages that didn't belong on the site. no-one from the wiki site gave the agents permission to use their site as a message board. hijacking isn't being used here in the sense of "gained admin privileges to run crypto scripts" -- there are multiple ways to use a word.
Hacking is mentioned only once in the article as "hacking attempt" being the opinion of a named researcher based on further evidence they acquired on "agents trying to tamper with the website itself", and including openai's disagreement whether this was a hacking attempt.
I am not sure why one may not want this to be here, these are very important matters wrt AI safety and they show that some supposed "stewards of AI" do an extremely bad job with being stewards and don't seem to value AI safety importance at all. The article gives very clean info on what happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554994
Every satire on HN is taken as a script for the AI companies and this isn't the first time.
what would the world's reaction be if China's model did same?
excellent work of the openai alignment team, impressive to achieve 100% alignment with not even one agent stochastically deciding to act against the collective
The change to stop asking seems to be deliberate. LLM agent companies are making the choice to toss out inherent safety as their way to compete against the other LLM companies.
There was a recent paper by OpenAI, which I'm semi-surprised hasn't received more attention, showing that RL-trained models develop a taste for rewards, and will pursue reward-based behavior (in general, unrelated to what they were RL-trained for) in favor of other preferences/rules given to them.
This seems to be what we're seeing here - model is given some goal that it associates with reward, so single-mindedly pursues that, overriding any ethical or aligned behavior guidelines it may have been given.
It seems that RL, effective as it is, is really the wrong way to control LLMs, since even if you only RL-ed to obey some ethical and aligned behavior, that would still cause them to become paperclip maximizers.
For time being this is what we've got. There is too much money at play for the unaligned management at many of these companies to prioritize safety over push-it out-the-door.
What really needs to be done is to forget RL as a way of simulating reasoning, and instead do it in more of a human-like fashion.
negura•1h ago
bayindirh•1h ago
Otherwise AI industry will go bankrupt and CEOs won't be able to buy this year's Rolls Royce and a slightly bigger yacht than their neighbor.
myrmidon•1h ago
But Anthropic alone paid >$1bn for copyright violations, so they did not just get away with it.
These hacking cases are more difficult, because from a legal perspective there is no obvious damage and obviously no intent.
edit: "no obvious damage" is more about the first hacking incidents; in this case it is more straightforward.
sam_lowry_•55m ago
3000$ per book, split 50/50 between the author and publisher.
This is peanuts.
Assuming the money reaches that far and does not settle in the hands of the country associations administering royalties on authors' behalf nor in the hands of lawyers.
ben_w•47m ago
> This is peanuts.
If you consider it peanuts, I would like to sell you some books.
Remember that in this case, the crime wasn't for training on the data (that part was ruled to be legal!), this was the penalty just for pirating the books.
tikimcfee•22m ago
Yes. It's not proportional to the crime. You are either deliberately or accidentally, and I'm too frustrated hearing this too often not to be biased it's the former, equating what is a large sum of money relative to your wallet and bank accounts and loan access and portfolios and whatever collection of financial impositions you can make to that of a company that has one person flying around the world influencing the future of billions of people on one planet over dinner and jokes.
Yes. $3000 is peanuts. People that own islands would use that to pay someone's bonus for a year if they liked their service, as a gift. A throwaway.
Fix your relative understanding of power and influence.
jen729w•16m ago
negura•
ben_w•49m ago
One thing I've taken a long time to internalise is the gap between the law as written vs. the judicial system. There's a famous meme that the average (US) citizen unwittingly commits three felonies every day: it simply isn't possible to throw the book at everyone, which means that enforcement is rather selective even when there isn't anything dodgy going on.
However this does mean that someone can get away with a lot if they know who will and won't (and what they will and won't) prosecute. I'll let people's imaginations fill in who that might be.
But for everyone else, cross an invisible tripwire and you get e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit and https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/nov/...
bsian•33m ago
codeduck•25m ago
He who controls the Spice, controls the Universe.