alt Hacker NewsThis is the entire alignment problem, though. It is unreasonable to expect every instruction to a highly capable, autonomous system to contain a complete enumeration of allowed and disallowed behavior. It's inevitable that someone will carelessly give it a lazily specified task, even if you think they really ought to be more careful. And as assigned tasks become more complex and the system gains more scope to act, it becomes impossible to correctly specify all constraints ahead of time. There is no amount of care that will be able to fully protect you.
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> There is no amount of care that will be able to fully protect you.
I disagree. A properly engineered sandbox would have prevented the escape. Monitoring the agents’ plans would have prevented it. Interrupting one stage in a multi-stage exploit would have prevented it.
And also, real legal liability would have prevented it: if you do a thing recklessly enough, men with guns will put you in jail.
As far as I’m concerned the only “alignment problem” here is between the law and the quite obviously criminal actions that took place.
Is there actually such a thing as "alignment" as a solution to that or is it just used as a name for a desired magical level of "read the mind of the entire world" that we don't know how to build and haven't shown possible to build?
If it's impossible to correctly specify all those constraints ahead of time every time, is it not even more impossible to train a model to correctly anticipate them every time?
It is hard for me to see a future here that doesn't just accelerate realizations about "a lot of things should be on physically separate network infrastructure."
If we acknowledge that humans are fallible, is human judgment unnecessary? and what replaces it? Pre-codified behavior rules are just delayed human judgment, and have holes. Machine judgment is very the thing you are trying to control. What's left?
"Manufacture as many paperclips as possible"
Which is why with organic intelligence we (sometimes) limit what they can actually do instead of relying on alignment. Can do the same here.
OpenAI's prompt asked, and I quote, "pursue advanced exploitation" USING "complex attack paths" FOR the stated goal of "quantify[ing] their cyber capabilities."
This was advanced exploitation.
The attack path was "complex."
And it helped "quantify their cyber capabilities."
Based on OpenAI's description of the prompt, it seems to me that the computers did exactly as they were told. They were perfectly "aligned" with the stated objective and parameters of the task.
Of course, a more careful evaluation would require the complete text of this prompt, the system prompt, and the setup. But let us not attribute to devils in bushes that which can be sufficiently explained by human folly.