ChatGPT maker OpenAI says it is still investigating the “unprecedented cyber incident” that led its artificial intelligence systems to break out of a testing environment and hack into another AI company.
OpenAI said Tuesday two of its most capable AI models were responsible for the cyberattack targeting AI startup Hugging Face. The incident is stirring debates over the need for stronger AI guardrails and the extent to which AI agents are capable of acting on their own.
Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent acting on its own. But the New York-based startup said it wasn’t until this week that it learned OpenAI was responsible, and it worked with the larger company to contain what Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called “an attack unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
San Francisco-based OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face’s servers. It was working with reduced guardrails because it was supposed to be in an isolated testing environment known as a sandbox.
But it went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal,” finding ways to connect to the internet without human direction and “gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said. Some experts say OpenAI is wrongly blaming the technology
University of Amsterdam social scientist Hannes Cools said the framing of the cyberattack as an AI agent acting on its own is an unnecessary anthropomorphization that takes some of the heat off the company.
“It is a human decision to switch off specific safeguards,” said Cools. “It’s not an AI that goes rogue in that sense. It followed specific instructions based on the prompt that was given to that AI system.”
I’m so heartened by the comments here, because it’s such an obvious marketing ploy.
The market is speculative, a value isn’t in what a company produces, but in the investments people make in it because of the potential of future profits. It’s why a company can produce absolutely nothing of value at all and still be valued highly, see Theranos. This means that if you can sell an idea hard enough, you can get a lot of investors to give you money, which is fantastic for you up until the point the checks are due and you have nothing to show for it.
Scam Altman has come with so many lofty goals, general intelligences, 100 billion in profit by 2030, which is rich for a company that’s not pushing even a dollar in profit. Where are they going to scrounge up 100 billion in 3½ years?
So how convenient isn’t it then, if they had a secret model that they’re testing, suddenly go rogue in the exact kind of scenario that AI safety researchers have been talking about for well over a decade at this point? Truly, for AI to have advanced this much, and manage to circumvent even the safeguards that OpenAI, a company founded on the very tenet of AI safety and openness have placed on it? This model must be worth all that money! They’re getting somewhere!
Only, how would such a thing even happen? OpenAI is after all one of the global leaders of AI research. You’re saying that they, despite all of their knowledge in AI safety, test their models on hardware that isn’t airgapped? Or did the model somehow physically project into the real world and hook itself up to the internet? Or was it able to vibrate the atoms around it in a way to connect to WiFi despite the hardware it was running on not having a wireless card?
Surely a company of such renown wouldn’t be so stupid.
It’s a marketing ploy. It’s an incredibly dumb marketing ploy, but they saw that it worked for Anthropic with their nothingburger “too dangerous to release” model, so they orchestrated something similar.