alt Hacker News> someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm [...] responsibility should be held by those who use it
This is obviously already the case and it's much different from a scenario where the AI genuinely takes unexpected action.
I frankly find it ridiculous how many suggest OpenAI or its employees should face criminal charges, without actual legal basis at the time.
It's also hardly outrageous that they ran training and/or benchmarks with only network-isolated VMs with access to a package repository.
This being the first well-known incident of its kind, I wouldn't expect them to have done more than that.
The idea that AI labs will now intentionally have their models hack companies in order to market their models, well, I don't even know what to say.
That's ridiculous and what you describe would obviously be criminal behavior under existing law.
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They saw the package repo get hacked once, then did not isolate it further, did not audit it for other issues (using their own models!), did not monitor it after, and baked that behavior into the weights via RL.
They were not in network isolated VMs, from my understanding they used containers sharing a kernel, so a Linux kernel local privilege escalation across the whole syscall surface (there are zillions of these) was sufficient to break out. Breaking xen or firecracker or something would have been much harder, which is why cloud providers running untrusted workloads use them and similar tools. No system is impenetrable but it's not like they were following best practices here.
> I frankly find it ridiculous how many suggest OpenAI or its employees should face criminal charges, without actual legal basis at the time.
Sam already committed other criminal acts and violations, but nobody wants to believe the victim because they were a woman and Sam The Golden Family Child Could Do Nothing Wrong(tm).
If Altman was in prison we wouldn't be this blatantly far out in the open with OpenAI's continual nonconsensual assault on the open Internet.
I don't think it was intentional or marketing, but I think it was criminally negligent and they should be held responsible.
They gave powerful models with no guardrails access to the Internet and didn't monitor it.
Even the slightest bit of monitoring of their outgoing Internet activity would have immediately given it away and they could have shut it down.
They were asleep at the wheel, and that's just plain negligence.