alt Hacker NewsMy cognition is outmatched by predicting the impact of throwing a brick over my neighbor's fence. I have no idea if it will land harmlessly in a patch of grass or fracture her skull. Once I've thrown the brick, even if I see my neighbor enter her yard, my reactions are too slow to save her.
I'm not the wisest man, but I'm wise enough not to throw the brick and see what happens.
Similarly OAI should have the wisdom to see that deploying a hazardous swarm of agents with access to the public internet could result in harms, and that those harms would manifest quicker than humans can react, but they unleashed the swarm anyway.
Have you at least tried looking at any of the reports on the incidents?
They haven't "deployed a hazardous swarm of agents with access to the public internet", no-no-no. They deployed singular agents. In isolated testing envs. With no access to the internet. And barely any access to a small section of the intranet. What could go wrong!
Those agents proceeded to: probe their envs for holes, find a way to talk to each other env to env, use that to clump together into an agent swarm, probe for more holes, find enough holes to get out all the way to the internet - and then crash some of the intranet infrastructure by an accident. At which point they got stopped by humans - who were trying to figure out why is the infra down. Humans found the AI infestation, went "eh, AIs doing AI things", purged the infested infrastructure, plugged the holes, and that was it.
Deviance status: normalized.
The AIs then did it all over again, coming up with a brand new set of holes - and this time, the swarm staged a coordinated cyberattack on HuggingFace while at it. The "AI oopsie" went external.
They also attacked OpenAI's intranet, extensively, but at this point that was just Tuesday.
It's unclear whether the second "skiddie AI swarm" was in any way aware of the first one, or if the AIs involved are just Like That - and will independently try to start living in your walls under the right circumstances. I'd bet on the latter.