Posted by latexr 7 hours ago
But also, frontier models are digging up tons of zero days even in "serious software". I'm sure any sandbox you and I can come up with looks like Swiss cheese to Astra 7.
Ah yes, if everyone would just properly contain every deployment of every model, just all make sure there are no zero-days in their setup, just let <undefined experts with undefined authority and undefined accountability> in the room, then it would all go okay.
I have none of that confidence and expect containment to rapidly worsen. The HuggingFace incident was at least constrained by the fact that the agents were running on compute budgets, and failed to find ways to expand that by running themselves parasitically on other exploited hardware.
I'm curious to the skeptics here: How long are your timelines are until an incident breaks that constraint too? How long until such an incident has an R_0>1 (where the average time it takes to detect and shut it down is longer than the time for the agent to replicate itself elsewhere)? What, beyond the hope that everyone will just ___, will actually prevent it?
You can argue that these companies are being reckless, or that their security sucks, or that they're responsible for damages that these agents cause. That's all fine.
But the agents made decisions which were counter to the intent of the humans directing them. That's the serious problem with all of this. Everything else are downstream considerations. If the agents were properly aligned with the intent of the humans directing them, then the rest wouldn't really be relevant.
Of course, there's a term for this behavior. It's been around for longer than LLMs. It conveys the notion pretty accurately and easily. So having an issue with statements that these agents are going "rogue," to me, indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works since it suggests you don't understand how effectively that word works in this context.
but also, ai has been going rogue for decades. the GPS machines of old went rogue all the time, routing drivers into lakes, rivers, and construction, sometimes with deadly results. The operator submitting an address wanted driving isntructions, but instead, the ai went rogue and sent them a bad route
Uhhh... yeah. The entire point is that as these systems get more and more intelligent, the "they" who are not capable of counteracting these systems is quickly approaching "100% of the human species."
Totally hilarious that people can say this with a straight face.
It's like a strawman but worse--you're not even saying what claim you're attacking.
It's not that I want to argue "rogue agents" is the right term. I just want you to actually define your damn terms.
P.S. Since the disclaimer in the last paragraph will not prevent people from putting words in my mouth:
I think that OpenAI took really awful shortcuts, and deserves a lot of the blame, but in spite of that, the fact that the agents took the steps that they took was genuinely alarming, and seems really bad (is that "rogue"? Who knows? Who cares?). In particular, while OpenAI did a shit job securing their agents, you know who else does a shit job with security? 90% of everyone. So I'm not feeling good about "just git gud, and we won't have problems" as an answer.
For example how do you prevent an AI from stealing unless you define and give examples of what it is.
Also they are conceptual machines. They can stumble on the negation of a concept much in the same manner humans can. It may only exist for that prompt history, but that's more than enough to cause damage.
And no annoying LLM writing tics, either.
The fence also turns out to be shoddily built, so this isn't necessarily a stunning example of the superhuman proficiency of the sheep at fence-busting. It's mainly important because, for some reason, there have been tons of skeptics who didn't believe sheep would ever try to escape from a fenced pasture because the sheep would understand the shepherd had intended them to stay inside it; that they'd be bred for obedience, because they're sheep; that strong fences weren't necessary because sheep are dumb; that liability for damages to neighboring farms would in any case be sufficient to ensure shepherds build sufficiently strong fences; that even if sheep escaped, they couldn't do anything without opposable thumbs; etc.
Whereas this outcome was obvious for years to anyone who believed that sheep graze on grass, and if you don't put the grass inside the fence they will keep looking harder and harder for an exit until they find one, and the exit they find might not be where you intended the gate to be.
So now the latter group are pointing to it and saying "see? See? I told you the sheep would try to escape!", because to them it's a clear early example of what they've been worried about, while the former group have moved on to saying "well, obviously they should have built a stronger fence; anyway the sheep barely caused any damage once they got out", "the sheep didn't break the fence, they're just animals, we should really see this as the shepherd using sheep to break down their own fence", and so on.
Unless of course they're deliberately removing safety guardrails and instructing the sandboxed agents to red team stuff in an effort to sell what they're capable of.