Comment by sam_lowry_
12 hours ago
PR exercise or not, there was a successful hacking attempt, the company behind it acknowledged it.
It's a crystal clear case for OFAC, the French cyber-security branch of the National Police.
I guess FBI would happily move such a simple case through the court system as well.
Nobody is pressing charges because nothing happened. It wasn't nefarious either.
I don't get what France has to do with this Huggingface and OpenAI are both US companies.
> It wasn't nefarious either.
Agree. But it was clearly recklessness, given they've have a history of similar issues in the past, they literally ran these sort of tests on 3rd party infrastructure while knowing what the risks were (alternatively, didn't evaluate the risks beforehand so they didn't even think this could happen), and didn't sufficiently isolate something that can clearly impact others and the public.
Had this been a chemical, virus or some other regulated thing, we'd be seeing people going to jail over this. But given LLMs are still fairly dumb and doesn't yet seek world domination or the downfall of humanity, this is apparently OK and entertainment instead.
> Had this been a < thing it was not > we'd be seeing people going to jail over this.
"If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike."
Well a chemical spill has victims. Whether this incident has a victim is up for debate. From my vantage point (and presumably OP's) HF as a foundational institution in the US AI industry stands to gain a lot more from successful doom marketing than they lose from, what? A dozen devs having to respond to an incident?
If they could know going in that there would be a net gain for HF in this incident, then it really nullifies the distinction between "recklessness" and "intention" on OpenAI's part. It's no coincidence they chose a target in their own industry with hundreds of personal relationships between them. It's not like they hacked into an Indonesian bank or something.
AFAIU HuggingFace is a US company only because all successful companies end up setting up a US HQ.
Anyway. Allow me to politely disagree with the essence of your statement. Hacking happened.
I think the no action results speak for themselves. I'm not sure what there is to disagree about to be honest.
A victim doesn't have to press charges for charges to be filed by the state. In fact, historically, the state is the one to file charges.