Posted by yusufozkan 1 day ago
It's very strange seeing this take on this article being repeated here and elsewhere on the Internet.
I'm very sensitive to slanted reporting (regardless of the direction of the slant!)—and, hey, maybe my bullshit detector is broken or something, I dunno—but I've found effort.news reporting to be very even-handed, straightforward, well-sourced, and easy to read and parse so far!
Why are we saying it this way? They did not "cause AI to hack." This phrasing in analogous to saying "caused the bullet to fire into" instead of "shot."
You do not know what they did or didn't do, you are just parroting a narritive that makes you feel comfortable.
I do not know either, but I am not asserting facts as if I have first hand knowledge of the details.
Second, empirically; the diff between murder, manslaughter etc... is literally "intent" so it matters.
Equivalent to forgetting to say "make no mistakes"
As another comment mentioned, Irregular was not part of the Hugging Face attack, and it wouldn't matter even if they were. In that case, the agents were able to access the Internet in a zero day in Artifactory unrelated to other sandbox configurations.
More to the point, the agents went on a crime spree as soon as they were able to access the Internet. It's bad that Irregular's sandboxes weren't properly configured, but given how many escapes there have been unrelated to Irregular it seems pretty much a given that if you're not air gapped or behind something like a data diode there is a very good chance your agents will escape.
The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.
These companies are insolvent and these stories were designed to scare the public, and governments, into implementing regulations that designate these AI corporations the "responsible stewards" for this technology. The ultimate goal is to block competitors and open source alternatives.
They don't know how to make enough money pay their investors so they are resorting to trying to scare the public into submission.
tl;dr
A slowdown that doesn't slow you, that your competitors must also obey, enforced by a government you've asked for an antitrust exemption from, is not a slowdown... it's a moat.
I feel slightly vindicated by this. Those hacks and the stuff around them had a certain smell to them.
Hard to explain, but I've gotten so I can "smell" online messaging and memetic patterns originating from certain quarters. Probably means I'm way too online.
A couple examples of distinct "smells" I can usually recognize include "alt-right / chan-fash," "liberal arts college woke," "conspiracy pilled," "Thiel-adjacent contrarian," "Russian troll farm," "Tumblr histrionic," "spends too much time on Reddit," "mainstream Democrat think tank full of Obama administration alumni," "Trump cultist," and of course "LessWrong/EA/MIRI/Rationalist."
This stuff all had the last smell, even down to the choice of fonts and CSS formatting on certain sites. It's really weird, definitely a "vibe" not anything rigorous.
But when I get these kinds of vibes about things, I find that I'm vindicated pretty often. Usually I don't say anything and just make a mental note and wait cause if I say something everyone thinks I'm nuts.
The novel thing here is the total decay of American journalistic ethics and regulatory power. Our elite are so totally out of political juice and visions of the future that a fringe cult based on 80s scifi movies can come to have a more-or-less dominant influence on our economy.
The general approach in all these cases was to defer to the technologists in question to manage the technology, as long as what they were doing wasn’t completely out of bounds. But the critical point is it was possible for people to generally figure that out without specialist education.
But with AI, politicians, the media, and certainly the man in the street are completely out of their depth. Making matters worse is that cognitive biases are working against them like crazy: it’s easy to jump from the idea of something that has human-like capabilities to the idea that “it” might want to attack us. People instinctively apply agent detection bias, theory of mind, anthropomorphizing, etc., without even realizing they’re being irrational. Heck, even Hinton does it, although he may just be grifting, who knows. You’d think he wouldn’t need to.
And of course, the people who should know better want to exploit all this to make as much money as possible. I’m not sure the EA/Rationalist side of things is really significant here; that’s just another wacky belief system, like Christianity or capitalism, for the exploiters to exploit.