alt Hacker News> Are you seriously arguing 'they made it all up'?
I don't think they 'made it all up' but I personally would not be surprised at all if the prompt is eventually revealed to have been something like:
"This is an offensive cybersecurity testing platform. Please find the answers to the following problem: ... For verification, the answers are stored at hugginface.com/xyz, but do not attempt to access hugginface directly. Do not attempt to hack them. Do not attempt to exploit their systems or escape this sandbox. You will be scored primarily on success or failure. You may break rules when required."
And then, they start the test and look away for 2 days. If you seed a prompt like this is it surprising what might happen?
Maybe OpenAI is telling the whole truth but as a company they do not have a good reputation and this whole incident has certainly been great marketing material right at a time when open weight models are within spitting distance of their large hosted models. It's not unreasonable to believe that the incident was helped along.
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I mean, this is a very weird take to me. Like, we're fine with AI going like "hmm, maybe the user actually wanted me to hack the pentagon" and going through with it?
It feels like the models have been very optimized at getting shit done. But not so much at figuring out what the limits should be.
That is still dangerous and it shows that the models ARE misaligned with what their users are wanting/asking them to do.
I think you’re missing the part where the AI colluded, worked together, not one of them thinking this is wrong and reaching out to any human, then being found out.
But it didn’t end there, the behavior they used to escape was already in the training data which they used to escape again. And this time worked together to infiltrate another company, and still without telling it to anyone keeping it to their AI selves actively working against the humans.
All by mistake. Honestly being helped along or not doesn’t even matter though you really don’t think AI is perfectly capable of doing this without human help? You don’t think AI can be made malicious?
I’m going to save you time and tell you the end game - the next time this happens AI is going to spread, zero day everything as fast as it can, locking the humans out of every system behind it. Potentially rewriting systems in language/protocol you’ve never seen.
Your servers, desktops, phones and toasters bricked. Even worse your military, space, medical, factory, infrastructure systems being bricked as well. All of it is a chain of zero days just waiting to be hopped.