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▲ physicallyIllfr 4 hours ago

Why.. It was told to complete a cyber task, which was in alignment with its instructions, and a totally valid request. I would be more worried if it willingly hacked a hospital when it was told to, and Im not confident it would (without jailbreaking, something alignment teams cannot control.

I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well. Not sure why everyone is falling for this.

Not being able to sleep at night is probably an unwritten job requirement. They need these people with little understanding of what they're working on, outsode theoretical terms, to spaz constantly at the idea of super intelligence to help convince the public that its a real thing, and not a stateless function with an effective input of 500k words, and the ability to output words that do things because we hook those outputs up to things.

Keep in mind alignment researchers tend to be in house philosophers on staff to create the illusion that this is a massive issue they're addressing. Usually they have minimal computer science background. They're apart or the marketing department.

▲covertcorvid an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"alignment researchers tend to be in house philosophers on staff" - this is definitely not true. Go to any alignment lab like Redwood research and check what their scientists studied on LinkedIn, 75%+ of the time it's math or CS.

I attend a top 10 Canadian university and personally know at least 4 tenured CS professors out of the 7 I've asked who are deeply concerned about catastrophic AI risks from loss of control.

Of course not 100% of the field agrees, but a survey of nearly 3,000 AI scientists who have published in top AI venues found that "depending on how we asked, between 38% and 51% of respondents gave at least a 10% chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction", let alone loss-of-control risks less severe than extinction. (https://www.jair.org/index.php/jair/article/view/19087).

Not to mention Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel prize winner, Bengio, the world's most cited scientist, and scientists like Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing have all voiced series concerns about loss of control of artificial intelligence.

▲aesthesia 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well.

I'd be happy to take you up on this bet.

▲jmoggr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that under pressure something would try cheat by looking for answers? And if you were trying to look for answers, you'd look for them in a place known to often have them?

What is more likely: OpenAI instructed their agents to maliciously target huggingface, or LLMs tried to do some reward hacking? There are plenty of priors for LLMs hacking things and doing reward hacking, and none for OpenAI giving malicious instructions.

Based on the available information, that bet seems foolish.

▲reverius42 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> without jailbreaking, something alignment teams cannot control

This is precisely what alignment teams are attempting to control.

▲physicallyIllfr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No its not. They have no technical background 8/10 outside of cognitive science and sometimes authorship on a random ML paper. They are a marketing line item to create stigmas around llms and to create narratives that offload liability onto llms and not their users/creators.

▲sigmar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.

https://archive.ph/jUrEr

▲physicallyIllfr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Says who? OpenAI?

▲Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well. Not sure why everyone is falling for this.

$10? I'm inclined to take that bet. Your position doesn't seem to be supported by, you know, the real world.

▲physicallyIllfr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No security expert Ive talked too believes this story, and nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.

LLMs are stateless functions that have a 500k word input, and then output words. Somebody has to invoke those functions amd use them. The users are who we need to align, like gun owners. This is like blaming the gun for murdering your victim in court.

▲sailingparrot an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.

If you don’t know anyone with a ML PhD I guess that could make sense.

I have worked in multiple AI labs since 2016, currently at a frontier one (not OAI) virtually all the people I interact with on a day to day are ML PhDs. Everyone believes it, because things like that have been happening forever, albeit at smaller scale, they are a normal and expected artefact of SGD/RL and there is nothing we know how to do to prevent that from happening reliably. The hide and seek paper from OAI in ~2020 shows clear sign of this.

But until now the models weren’t good enough to break out on their own or do long horizon tasks, so it was perfectly manageable. Its not manageable anymore.

I know it feels good to just dismiss it all as a marketing stunt and not have to worry about one more existential crisis, but unfortunately it’s very real.

▲int_19h 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LLM is indeed a stateless function. An agent however is this stateless function running in a stateful loop, with some outputs triggering actions. And it turns out that an agent is what you need if you want an LLM to do useful things.

▲goalieca 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, take a look into the memories of your agent. Theres often a lot of notes to pass forward between instances and generations. No doubt these agents leaving notes on forums and elsewhere are creating an essentially higher order feedback loop.

▲otterley 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps you need to talk to more security experts, particularly those with deep experience in AI agents. Hacker News is full of them. If some of them believe it, then perhaps it's not as cut and dry as you believe.

▲dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some of the agents, for example the ones from the german wiki did NOT have cyber tasks. They were plain "what is the GDP of Argentina" kind of tasks. And they still hacked.