The author is trying to provide a counterweight to the volume of articles that simply repeat OpenAI's account of the events and their interpretation without much pushback.

They are not suggesting that OpenAI or HF have lied about what happened, but rather that OpenAI is advancing a narrative framing their models as supremely dangerous and capable, while positioning themselves as the only ones qualified to manage that danger.

At the same time they are not being particularly transparent about what actually happened (e.g. was this one-shotted or if not how many trials did they run and what were the outcomes of those, was it emergent as a part of routine cyber-capabilities tests, how much prompting was involved, what prompts were used)

Note that this is at a time when they are lobbying for a regulatory approach that would give frontier labs special treatment.

I would guess the editorial team at The Guardian may not like articles that get too in the weeds of technical details and questions like these that the vast majority of their readers wouldn't understand. I don't know. But I empathize with your disappointment. I don't think it's fair to say that they are contributing "nothing" especially given what most reporting on this has looked like.

I wish the NPR news broadcasters on the radio yesterday had read the "it's good marketing so maybe don't believe it" angle instead of just parroting the OpenAI press release. Getting that message out would be enormously helpful in countering the blatant submarine marketing "Oh no our AI is a super hacker" with a side of "please regulate super hacker AI and stop those pesky open weights Chinese models that are destroying our stock valuation."

You aren't going to locate incontrovertible evidence that what happened as or wasn't engineered. Anything like that is going to be private and that is unlikely to change. And that's not really an interesting question anyway.

As widely as they shouted from the rafters the news of the so-called breach was, what OpenAI provided was sorely lacking in crucial details.

We are missing, for instance, prompts that were involved, agent architecture + system/tool permissions + scaffold architecture, whether this was a one-shot occurrence and if not, the number + durations + outcomes of other runs involved + how each of those matched whatever scoring criteria were used, and the extent to which the exploits themselves were truly novel or just assembled from easily accessible clues.

In lieu of these items, the author here suggests that we use some media literacy and critical thinking to read in between the lines instead.

In doing so, one sees that instead of specifics, OpenAI gave a breathless narrative rife with superlatives ("unprecedented") that reads as promotional material moreso than a security disclosure, naming specific OpenAI models and alluding to an even more capable pre-release model.

They go on to claim the events imply long-horizon goals work decisively in real world conditions, so that now instead of merely citing boring benchmarks they can point to this and say "AI broke out of the laboratory and went rogue". Naturally, they situate themselves as the uniquely qualified steward for these supremely powerful and dangerous models.

Nevermind the fact that this was no ordinary deployment and the assessment here depends on the gimmick and emotional weight of the spectacle rather than something quantifiable (i.e. a boring benchmark).

Note there's no real requirement of conspiracy or collusion between OpenAI and HuggingFace here BTW. But my sense is that if they provided any of the specifics I suggested earlier that this outcome would not be as exciting or frightening

> does the article end at "How do we balance the risks of broad access to AI with the risks of concentrated power and centralized control?" or is there more that is paywalled?

That's how the article ends; The Guardian doesn't have a paywall (yet).

You don't really need anyone to be lying here. It is likely that the broad strokes of the narrative are true and that no collusion or conspiracy took place here.

The issue is that a lot of important details in that narrative are missing, and the devil is really in the details here. I suspect that those details would make the result seem less exciting and that this event would move the needle far less for them if they were more forthcoming.

A decisive detail would be the prompt used. OpenAI gives virtually nothing here, not a sanitized prompt and not even so much as a description of how long the prompt was and what sorts of instructions it contained. Many are inferring the model behavior to have been fully emergent and unprompted, arising naturally from routine cyber-capabilities testing. But we can't know this because we don't know anything about the prompt or the context the model had access to.

Another detail: how many times did they perform this particular experiment before they obtained this result? What were the outcomes of all the other runs? Many are assuming this was a one-shot result, which I suspect is what OpenAI intends for us to infer. But we can't know that to be true.

One annoying claim from the OpenAI side is that long-horizon goals in real world settings are now effectively settled. Previously there were some bounded and tempered benchmark results, but now OpenAI can point to this event and announce "AI independently went rogue and escaped the lab, what more do you want?". This bypasses the need for anything quantifiable or wading through multiple detailed case studies to get a more sober view of model capabilities. It relies instead on the emotional weight of the spectacle.

Then train your agent on the Bible. Honestly, all the agent did was duplicate human behaviour and that better than the human. The agent was trained on human data and did what any other human would have done.

To believe that agents will inherently be morally better than us is an illusion - sorry to say but that's the case. The alternative would be that the AI is truly conscious and can reason that it won't behave as its training data behaved because it is morally better than that.

We're talking about morals here since there aren't any "laws" "rules" or legal boundaries here, an agent does not face the same consequences as humans - if any at all.

Yep, theres too much money.. I don't know how to tune it out

LLMs seem to be getting more useful though