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20k • today at 6:29 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Yep. You have to ask - why did OpenAI allow these bots unrestricted access to government sites? Why is security being done in seemingly such a haphazard way?

It isn't difficult to block certain kinds of network traffic, eg restrict the kinds of requests the bots are able to make. They also mention that the bots used developer only tools - why were they even installed on the machines that the bots were running on? Why aren't they reviewing network traffic, to make sure that incidents aren't occurring?

In this case, userdata was transferred to third parties by the bots - why do they have the ability to pass data to a third party? It is not complex to prevent this

This is literally the most basic kind of sandboxing and security, and the fact that OpenAI isn't doing it is clearly intentional. It is quite literally not believable that this hasn't been brought up internally as a problem

>"We have yet to understand the extent of existing incidents, and future rogue AI scenarios could be catastrophic," Krueger said.

This is why it smells like marketing, every time one of these incidents happens it reinforces the false notion that AI is sentient or acting on its own. Its intentional negligence by the AI companies to make the models seem more capable than they are to make line go up


Replies

0xDEAFBEAD • today at 7:10 PM

>line go up

It's already going up at staggering rate. Anthropic is now at $100B in annualized revenue, up 50% in the past two months.

* * *

Here's a little allegory for how I'm thinking about this discourse.

Imagine a man who is raising tiger cubs in his backyard. They're growing fast. He keeps them on dog leashes so they stay under control. One day, a growing cub breaks its leash and goes on a rampage through the neighborhood, eating a beloved local pet.

The neighborhood erupts into a big argument: Was the leash inappropriately thin? The neighbors point out that thicker leashes are easily available at the local pet store. Furthermore, is it appropriate to refer to the loose cub as a "wild animal" in local news reporting, or is it factually more accurate to call it "domesticated"?

Meanwhile, the cubs grow larger and lick their lips, oblivious to the discussion.

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jsnell • today at 7:51 PM

These were evaluations or training runs dealing with the ability to do web searches. The entire reason the bots were targeting this site is that it had some of the data they'd been tasked with finding. Access to the internet is not really optional for that, and providing internet access doesn't demonstrate neglicence.

> This is why it smells like marketing

It doesn't. "Our product commits felonies" is not marketing. If something is marketing, you don't engage in repeated coverups of the true extent. If something is good news, you don't release it on a Friday evening (in this case) or wait for 3rd parties to find and publicize the evidence (the past cases).

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jltsiren • today at 9:42 PM

> Yep. You have to ask - why did OpenAI allow these bots unrestricted access to government sites? Why is security being done in seemingly such a haphazard way?

The basic premise of OpenAI is that experience and expertise don't matter, because general intelligence can figure those out from data. If you start from that assumption, the rest follows. The same people could do things in a different way in a different company, but as long as they are working for OpenAI, they are going to do things in the OpenAI way.

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4d4m • today at 8:43 PM

I find it hard to believe logs are not stored and analyzed by each company implicated