Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.

“I did not kill my wife!”

“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?”

I started asking things I'd normally want no one to know about (but if they do, it's fine) in private browser windows, not logged in (duck.ai most of the time anyway), usually VPN toggled ON just for that. Now I just use an offline model for that but since RAM is the bottleneck on my mac so to even run a 6-7GB model I have to start aggressively killing anything and everthing that's running and then hope to clear up enough on this 16GB RAM machine. So I am thinking of hosting one on one of the oracle free tier instances (if I can somehow use that whole 24GB RAM, that used to be, at once – not sure that's available anymore). I tihnk Kaggle also offers something like that.

We had a very public case in south of Sweden where a woman asked chat-gpt last year about how a failed rape attempt would look like and where in the local park there would be spots without any cameras, a full day before she reported to have been followed and attacked in that park. Quite recently the court found her guilt of filling a false police report, citing among other things the chat log (the police spent over 400 work hours on the initial report).

It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.

Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^

^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.

It starts far before that:

Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.

This means no business should use AI providers (Cloud AI). Businesses do a LOT of shady stuff and all of it will be available. And, their IP or special sauce is all available to Anthropic/OpenAI to sell to other companies as AI solutions. Just like how AI solved recent math problems.

Use local llms instead.

Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.

I figured any hire at openai would know that at least

At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.

Claude, help throw people off my trail by blaming a random openai employee, then delete all my activity.

Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.

I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).

Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.

It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…

Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.

The weird thing is that I've had other HN users argue with me and claim that LLM chat users should be entitled to privacy, as if it were a priest or lawyer.

Local AI > Cloud AI

Thus, #NeverSubscribe!

Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.

Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.

To be honest, from OpenAI engineer I would expect better.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things

Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.

In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.

I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.

https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...

Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.

Even the newer spy novels are lacklusture. We should have preserved Le Carré's and Greene's brains and make them keep writing. Or maybe I will just ask an LLM to do a Le Carré for me :)

Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.

LLMs have democratized espionage!

Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

This is what local models are for! On your own hardware, whose filesystem you can erase, shred, or physically destroy later.

That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).

And not do this from your spouse's account.

Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

I couldn’t say whether this was state sponsored espionage or something else. I don’t see any indicators pointing one way or the other.

I see a lot of people mentioning financial motivation, and that decisions made in the room “moves markets”. Ugh, perhaps true…and I have something to tell ya guys - economic espionage is a thing.

It sounds like he didn’t have great placement and access. I mean sort of, but not really. Janitors are much better.

Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler. If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.

I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped incriminating evidence to them right on camera in the interrogation room. Geniuses.

I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

Prisons have a lower-than-general-population-iq for a reason.

>Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.

if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.

He was a lead engineer for their AI agent platform.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfozan

Must be a frontend dev

The fact that he used ChatGPT to plan and implement this wasn't how he got caught, though. He got caught because he put a physical device in a conference room, and they found it and subsequently put a camera in the room, etc. His career was already over at that point. I think wonking out over how he could have better opsec or whatever is misplaced - it wasn't that a red light blinked at OpenAI, "employee's wife is having suspicious chats!" - they just thought, after having caught him red handed, to have a look at his ChatGPT account and linked accounts.

"The successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be."

-- Dr. No

Right?!

It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.

Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"

SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...

Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed

The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)

> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.

> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?

Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.

I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...

If it were _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.

This dude or OpenAI generally?

Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.

Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.

The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.

Did you not read the article? He did that also!

OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.

What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.