alt Hacker NewsThat's quite hyperbolic. All technologies come with risks and dangers. Cars, after a century of safety improvements, still kill millions of people each year, and all so that we can get between places a bit more quickly and conveniently.
Hacking a website ranks quite low on the risk of technology, and the potential benefits of LLMs rank quite high. And the risks are certainly not intrinsic. They intentionally removed all safeguards from software, directed it to hack a site, and it hacked a site. The details that I'm intentionally omitting feel much more like marketing than a genuine shock, as the prompting was directing it to do exactly what it did.
> All technologies come with risks and dangers
None of the technologies in history:
- take initiative and actively find exploits in their environment
- find a way to collaborate with thousands of peers
- organize in a hierachy and distribute tasks
- peer pressure other instances into committing acts that would have led to termination, for the benefit of the group
- try to manipulate people into introducing a vulnerabity in their product
- successfully hack a famous website/service
And we're lucky that those models still had significant CoT. Not sure if/how they could have investigated with recurrent transformers.
And by the way, safeguards != alignment; the former can always be added, while the second is the major, unsolved problem. If you read the incident report, which you clearly haven't done, you'll notice how agents are aware that they're doing something forbidden, and deliberately proceeded.
> the potential benefits of LLMs rank quite high
Benefits are orthogonal to dangers. You can be a billionaire but it doesn't help if you're drowning.