> There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident. To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories

I’m one of those people who remains sceptical. Not about whether this happened. But about what it means. Like, how impressive [EDIT: tight] was the sandbox this model was in? Did the researchers really have no clue what was happening until days ex post facto?

So yes, I think something happened. But I want independent corroboration before I act on it. That isn’t the same as putting one’s head in the sand. It’s just demanding extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary and self-serving claim being made by a serial liar. The specifics matter for whether these models are a new HEU, or if they’re closer to a dangerous (but valuable) industrial process.

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simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> how impressive was the sandbox this model was in?

It was clearly a very unimpressive sandbox. It failed at the only thing a sandbox is meant to do.

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JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-]

As in was it trivially misconfigured? Would an earlier class of model have managed its way out similarly?

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simonw an hour ago | parent [-]

It wasn't that it was trivially misconfigured, it was using a piece of software (the HTTP proxy that provided access to PyPI and friends) which turned out to have a zero-day vulnerability.

I don't know if earlier models would have found that vulnerability. tptacek thinks they would: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015639#49024442

	▲	JumpCrisscross an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. I’d like independent corroboration. It’s fair, I think, to be sceptical of OpenAI making another bout of self-serving claims. Particularly if my threshold action is changing my answer to lawmakers around whether we need reporting, licensing and potentially personal liability requirements for the engineers involved.