alt Hacker NewsIt is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in. Even if somehow true, they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly. Models will not break the laws of physics.
They simply thought "Running in a VM/Container is easier and probably fine".
And the next 1000 escapes will be for the same reason, because negligence is quick and thus more profitable.
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> they also clearly failed to contract specialists like myself to advise them on how to airgap software properly
Why would they want to airgap it though? They are trying to evaluate the model capabilities, alignment, potency etc. A model which will not run in an airgapped environment in prod.
So if you run your evals in airgapped environment, sure, the model doesn't bother breaking out of it's isolation and doesn't attack HF. But you have no idea what will happen once you release it in prod with internet connection, so are you in any way better off?
I would much rather have this happen while there is a single instance of the model running in a fairly well monitored environment, than when it's processing thousands of requests per second for real users, some with dubious motives, some with credentials right there on their laptop, some using it inside government facilities etc.
> It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in.
It is, in fact, possible.
Do you not remember 2022-2023 when the air was singing with the sounds of young engineers in San Francisco elated they were creating an AI god?
And now a couple years later we're supposed to pretend they're competent?
Sorry. I've been in the tech industry a long time. There's a lot of incompetence. The margins provided by software allow a level of endemic incompetence that would simply not be possible in other industries.
Actually from what I read they did a very half assed job isolating the LLM from the internet. It would NOT be hard to do better.
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Do you think it's possible that one of their research engineers deployed an environment with a locked down network and an allow-list proxy server that had been used many times before within the company and had a zero-day vulnerability that had not been previously discovered?
How would you recommend running a coding agent in an environment that could install packages from PyPI but was otherwise unable to interact with the wider world?