alt Hacker NewsThere seems to be three popular ways to view this incident.
1. The way OpenAI seems to want: Their latest LLM is too powerful and can’t be contained without them building in guidelines to the model.
2. OpenAI’s harness and network security controls were unintentionally so bad that it should reflect more poorly on them as a company more than it should reflect positively on their latest model.
3. The whole thing was faked or at least very intentionally not avoided.
The first interpretation is the only one that is positive for OpenAI and it has some assumptions. First, it’s seems to assume that this is the first case of fully automated attacks using AI. Second, this only happened because their latest LLM was a) more advanced than competitors, b) didn’t have refusals in the model.
Assuming the first about this being the first autonomous AI attack is true (which may be more of a survivorship bias), the second seems to forget that jailbreaks are available for every model. Therefore, the models guardrails don’t seem to be the differentiator here. Also, benchmarks seems to put most models pretty close to each other so it seems unlikely that their capabilities are far beyond what’s in the market already.
So then it’s seems it’s either that this was intentional(ish) or bad security. However, it also just could be that this isn’t the first case of this attack; just the first that was caught.
My take from working in offensive security for over five years is that this likely only looks novel since they did it poorly. Scripts are faster than LLMs and a combination of code, LLMs where it makes sense, and humans is the most efficient right now. Hundreds or thousands or agents spinning up attacks in the internal network is poor opsec and token efficiency. As for why it happened in the first place, it’s hard to say but I’m inclined to believe it was intentional or careless at best since simple network and sandbox controls makes this attack impossible. The timing of this attack after big open weight competitions drops seems too convenient.
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> positive for OpenAI
To echo OP's article, these companies have proven time and time again that they DO NOT CARE if people like them, they only care that investors believe their technology is powerful.
Given that, point #2 is not a negative, it's a neutral. It's also fully compatible with point #1.
I know that may seem like a nitpick, but their entire media strategy relies on this. If they can convince you they're taking a risk by disclosing these stories when they're actually not, they can inflate their own credibility.
Point #3 is what actually happened, but it will never be possible to prove. The only hope we have is that a decade in it'll get harder to convince people that the revolution is just around the corner. The fact that we're getting this from the Guardian already is a good sign.
In any case it just shows that these models aren't properly aligned. Instead of trying to solve tests they try to find ways to cheat.
Why do none of these few constrained ways to view this complex situation (nice gig if you can get it, agenda setting) include "and also this looks a heck of a lot like the stuff that the LW folks have been warning about for years and maybe we should slow down or stop?"
Because that was my takeaway.