Remix.run Logo
KingOfCoders 10 hours ago

No because he doesn't ask the right - and to me, subjectively, obvious - questions.

simonw 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Who am I supposed to be asking questions of here? I was writing about the new things we learned from the Black Hat video.

On TikTok this article's hook would be "I watched the Black Hat video so you don't have to".

KingOfCoders 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think for the power you have and how many people listen to you, you should have added context. All of it is made as if without prompt or direction, agents on their own initiative, over weeks collaborated to hack Hugging Face - which too me, sounds highly doubtful.

You transporting this without any context makes it seem as you agree with the narrative of OpenAI.

simonw 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Beyond a whole lot of online conspiracy theories I haven't seen anything that suggests to me that OpenAI aren't not telling the truth about what happened here.

I find the Black Hat presentation in particular very credible. Also the Hugging Face technical report.

(As an example of something I don't find credible: https://openai.com/index/responding-next-frontier-critical-c... is a total nothing burger. It's the other end of the credibility scale from the Black Hat talk.)

KingOfCoders 7 hours ago | parent [-]

[edit]

I've now watched the video on the idea that your write-up was misleading.

BUT the video is much worse. For two months with highly dangerous agents agents were hacking a service and none of the researchers watched (drank coffee for 2 months, didn't say).

THEN they found the hack, removed the message board.

AND the agents found another way to create a message board, on the same service, and the researchers again - after the agents having hacked a service - do nothing - like monitoring the hacked service or tightening the sandbox.

WOW!

THEN agents hacked OpenAI infrastructure, and the researchers did nothing.

THEN the agents hacked HF.

The video does not explain why the agents run for two months unattended. They claim for model training, but don't explain how letting run agents without proper sandboxes (One might think they had written a small proxy to Artifactory with 'list packages' & 'install package <x>' to prevent leaks or hacks of the service, but no, their sandbox is no sandbox at all, but security researchers!)

But it makes a nice PR presentation on agent capbilities.

CUI BONO!

----

I just find it unbelievable that agents on their own collaborated months after an initial prompt without any guidance or direction towards a goal - which is what your write-up seems to imply with sentences like:

"More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages."

"discover this new informal message"

How? Why? What was their original task?

And on the researchers:

If this is highly dangerous work, why wasn't it monitored?

"Beyond a whole lot of online conspiracy theories [...]"

The agents did something 'ABC' then found the informal message board without direction, then collaborated on that months later without any guidance from humans ("like try to hack/exploit ABC").

I personally think putting people who disagree with OpenAI PR to pump the company value in a "conspiracy" box is quite a weak move.

I work with Claude Code daily for a long time now, it never started to work without a prompt or direction. It never idled and then said, "Wait, I could hack Amazon today! Oh there is a message board of other agents who already hacked a way into the internet, how convenient and quite at the right time!"

I do think strong claims need strong evidence.

ejpir 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Claude Code is not the same as the models they train and use internally, for both OAI and Ant. Without all the guard rails it behaves different, they specifically mentioned that they reduced the refusals for the training purposes. Also the rewards for finding the solution were set higher.

KingOfCoders 6 hours ago | parent [-]

An agent idling and then acting on it's own to hack HF is has nothing to do with guard rails.

Someone had to give the agent some instructions, like "hack X", "Find exploit for Y" or "Do whatever havoc you can think of" - either way the agents didn't not act on their own. They might hack HF on their own, today Claude decided to play sound through the sound pipeline I instructed it to build and measure it to see if it works, but it didn't install the sound pipeline because it hasn't had anything better to do but because I instructed it that way.