Comment by simonw
5 days ago
Do you think it's possible that one of their research engineers deployed an environment with a locked down network and an allow-list proxy server that had been used many times before within the company and had a zero-day vulnerability that had not been previously discovered?
How would you recommend running a coding agent in an environment that could install packages from PyPI but was otherwise unable to interact with the wider world?
Models started proving readily capable of autonomously finding 0days over a year ago. At that point (ideally long before) the responsible sandbox for research labs with new models highly capable of this sort of thing should be literally airgapped. Disconnect the rack physically from any access to the internet, and give it an offline mirror of all of PyPi, NPM, Wikipedia, whatever as needed. They can afford the disk space. They already mirror it all anyway as training data. That is the bare minimum. Personally I would rule out side channel attacks with a $40k Tempest spec rack for good measure. Can interact with it via pubsub over a fiber optic serial terminal.
Such things are pretty normal in biotech, fintech, and defense who must have 0days in their threat models. AI labs absolutely need to start being forced to operate this way by endless negligence lawsuits. Move fast and break things culture is not going to cut it anymore.
It seems like caching the relevant portion of PyPI in advance and turning the network off shouldn't be beyond what OpenAI can do?
I agree. I hope they learn that lesson and run future evals like this without pulling from external packaging repositories at all.
With my PSF board member hat on I'd like it if a whole bunch of other companies that make extensive automated use of PyPI (Microsoft and GitHub Actions for example) would do a better job of maintaining their own shared local caches.
If you play with the ChatGPT web app sandbox, you'll see that they download PyPI packages from an OpenAI mirror/cache, and not from the Internet.
I know because they had a problem, and one package which was on PyPI failed to download for unknown reasons (possible size, 250 MB)
I just tried this prompt in ChatGPT:
I got back a bunch of values like this:
That looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015639#49024814 - they're caching already.
From reading all these threads there's clearly a large number of software developers on HN who can easily set up complex infrastructure and make it provably 100% bug and exploit free. Weird that they aren't all billionaires from selling these skills though.
Unplugging the internet is easy. Running high risk code offline in highly tamper evident ways is hard, but plenty of teams like mine specialize in this sort of thing. (See: https://distrust.co and https://caution.co)
In our audits we regularly see billions of dollars in value at major companies at risk of theft by any anon paying attention that wants it, and we also absolutely know how to fix it and we maintain a lot of open source tools to accelerate doing so.
Some simply have no interest in any fixes that are not legally required or might have any short term impact on team velocity.
Survivors bias is a hell of a drug.
Being a billionaire has very little to do with engineering talent.
> How would you recommend running a coding agent in an environment that could install packages from PyPI but was otherwise unable to interact with the wider world?
You download the "website" and make it available locally. That's trivial.
guys if you need help just ask
I'm not up to hip with the speed because I think Python is very gross, but maybe to get a feel for it you could start with https://pypi.org/project/pypioffline/
I don't understand most of these words but I think if you paid me a lot of cash I could find someone who could help me make sense of it: https://techbeatly.com/offline-pypi-server-disconnected-envi...
Do OpenAI employees get paid? I'm honestly totally clueless about artificial telegents if you couldn't tell, but it's a company, right? Or is it more a community effort where everybody contributes when they can but they mostly have second jobs or even still go to school? In that case I say let's do a kickstarter so they can keep on being smart cutting edge high tech developers who aren't either a.) lying on the level of spam from Nigeria b.) doing their job at the level of someone falling for spam from Nigeria.