Seems to me that the problem is that if you sandbox agents enough to be safe, they can't do anything useful. And when you give them the tools to be useful, they can go off the rails in ways you didn't expect.
Perhaps the answer is to have another agent who's goal is not to complete the given task, but to spot cheating or malicious behavior. We have seen some evidence that having AI review AI generated code actually does provide some value. You don't need a different model, just one which has been given the goal of finding flaws rather than achieving the task.
That could work.
My thinking is: If AI is really smart, AGI smart for some, why wouldn't it be able to understand - over time - what is appropriate and what not?
Maybe we need more human intervention to train it properly. Maybe we need constant intervention by a "police" agent.
That does seem a little like solving the problems in AI by using more of it. I do see the idea, but if we're truly dealing with subversive agents on the level that the AI companies wants us to believe, then won't we need to deal with the first agent trying trick the second on?
I still feel it would be much better to control the training data much more tightly. You'd still need agents with "hacking" abilities, for cyber security testing, but your average coding agent doesn't. So coding agents gets trained to be good citizens, respect autorisations, rejections, rate-limiting and so on.
Sandboxing seems like a dead end for systems you inherently want to roam the internet and your file system.
Is that not a recipe for adversarial training, thus ensuring increasing misalignment…?
The problem is that you always need stronger AI to review weaker one, otherwise reviewed AI will eventually prompt-inject reviewing AI. Alternatively they could also both escalate and go off the rails while warring with each other.
With plenty of things we do not allow use outside of some regulated environment, nothing new.
Having something that is optically, acustically, and electromagnetically isolated might be a pretty strong sandbox.
If you can't trust a tool, you shouldn't be running it at all. It's really quite simple. It doesn't matter how useful it is if you can't actually have confidence in using it safely.
What did you think of the author’s concerns on the thing you are suggesting?