Comment by JaRail
2 months ago
If it was just one test, sure. But if they're spinning these up continuously with new models on tens of thousands of GPUs, air gapping becomes impractical. I would mostly fault them on having no guardrails at all. They should have a monitor/external harness that looks for successful access to external networks then stop it there. They may as well let the models test their own networks for vulnerabilities. That's going to be really important to have going forward.
You can have large scale airgapped environments.
They don’t even need to be fully airgapped from each other (and is not what I’m suggesting).
But there should be no physical (physical layer; wireless counts) to the internet.
Can models detect they are airgapped and change their behaviors?
How much of the internet do you have to simulate to know if the model knows it's in training?
If you (in this case, OpenAI) can’t find a way to answer this question to a reasonable degree of accuracy without falling back to “yolo let’s see what happens” you are in no position to be doing this research.
Regardless, they (reportedly) _attempted_ to prevent internet access. They just didn’t in a way which can be escaped via software.
Yes, side channel exploits exist in airgapped environments to. But if a model found a way to escape an airgapped environment via non-networked side channel attacks then the correct answer is frankly “shut it down immediately and then thermite any machine it touched”
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Honest question, why do they need tens of thousands of GPUs? I would have thought they could run a Sol-level model on a few million dollars of hardware. Let's say it's ten million dollars, and let's also say they want to test multiple models in multiple different ways. You're still talking on the order of a hundred million dollars to build an airgapped test system. Happy to have my math proven wrong here.
If its worth doing for one test, its worth doing when you spin up many. Quantity of tests does not change the value of an airgap.