OpenAI are trying to create the perception that their agents are independent thinking machines because their valuation depends on the world believing this.

That is why ‘asked’ is important, and why we should question their framing of incidents like the hugging face hack too.

They aren't really convincing themselves to do anything though. Once they've inferred an idea into the chain of though it will be part of the rest of the inference loop's prompt.

Its isn't convincing so much as it is direction to stick to the prompt on each inference loop. They don't see "access hugging face servers" and decide its a bad idea, that'd be a step towards the alignment problem but the companies fundamentally don't want that IMO, they want control rather than alignment.

> because agents can convince themselves that they need to do something for arbitrary reasons

OAI writes in their blog post "The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache".

But did their model training data include cybersecurity literature on similar CPU exploits? That would surely be a significant detail in any explanation. Did OAI share any analysis of the messages between agents while they were devising their communication method?

They have a strong incentive to make themselves look less incompetent retroactively.

If they claim their AI is too powerful to contain, they get to both pretend they are among the best AI labs and that the previous incidents weren't their fault, no, they just proved how good their models were.