Comment by janalsncm
9 hours ago
> There is no amount of care that will be able to fully protect you.
I disagree. A properly engineered sandbox would have prevented the escape. Monitoring the agents’ plans would have prevented it. Interrupting one stage in a multi-stage exploit would have prevented it.
And also, real legal liability would have prevented it: if you do a thing recklessly enough, men with guns will put you in jail.
As far as I’m concerned the only “alignment problem” here is between the law and the quite obviously criminal actions that took place.
Why do so many people here think it’s possible to ‘properly engineer’ a sandbox for a super intelligence? It’s going to get out. It’s smarter than you.
I could contain it easy, just unplug the internet. It got out of the sandbox through a vulnerability in the package manager, from which it gained access to the rest of their network. Air gap the package manager and this doesn’t happen. You can always build a better box
Too bad you aren’t everybody, and it just takes one mistake by someone over confident like yourself for the AI escape. Every year it gets more powerful.
Why do people think that omniscience is the same as omnipotence? There are limits to what smarts can accomplish.
People have been saying that since about the invention of the internet.
There's already a bunch of documented ways to exploit system hardware to jump airgaps. Bang the system bus the right way and it's a radio antenna that can directly connect to nearby mobile phones.
The easiest one is, of course, sending a message to a human saying "yo, I need internet". Humans are eager to please and easily fooled, and anthropomorphise everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
And that's just for good humans. The moment we got AI worth a penny, everyone with money to invest put a model on the web and tried to charge for access to it.
We're not building these things to sit around and do nothing. They will have access to tools, they will have access to the internet and peripherals, and they will be able to communicate with others, humans or agents alike. Omnipotence is not necessary. There is no perfectly secure cage for an entity you want to do useful work. Either it does nothing, or you can't guarantee anything.
There are limits, but those limits are unknown. Do you disagree?
5 replies →
Software are mathematical objects. It's just a matter of writing the correct mathematical proofs
There's just one problem. You need not only to verify your own software, but also run a verified compiler, a verified operating system and also need to verify the cpu doesn't leak data in side channels (perhaps the hardest thing to prove). So there's practical difficulties. But in principle this task is doable
Which proof is the perfect security proof? I’d love to read more about it.
Maybe it's the illusion of "it would solve all our problems and give us unimaginable riches" that clouds the mind?
Like when Evolution thought it a good idea to create intelligence and humans in order to maximize reproduction of genes, and tried to sandbox them by making reproduction so pleasurable and carbohydrates so delicious they would never be able to not reproduce or stop eating. But Evolution could never have predicted what these creatures would then actually do, which is invent birth control and sucralose.
Of course it's impossible to engineer a sandbox for something much much smarter and faster than you. It will also not have only one plan prepared for escape, but fifty in parallel.
Evolution doesn’t think, it just exploits what’s most advantageous at the time to continue. Your body has all sorts of unplanned, suboptimal design flaws due to evolution’s lack of foresight. Like the left recurrent laryngeal nerve.
1 reply →
Oh really? Please tell me how such a computer could engineer its way out of a sandbox with no attached peripherals and no NIC/bluetooth/wireless capability? This is what OAI should've done. If they had executed this training run in such a sandbox, the model wouldn't have been capable of escaping without social engineering, and if the models somehow managed to do that to it's evaluators then that is indeed a massive problem and OAI should disclose that.
It can manipulate an unsuspecting human into giving them access to something that enables it to escape the sandbox
11 replies →
>Oh really? Please tell me how such a computer could engineer its way out of a sandbox with no attached peripherals and no NIC/bluetooth/wireless capability?
Nobody is building general intelligence and agents only to have it sit around doing nothing. It's going to have such capabilities.
Oh really? Please tell me how you intend to enforce AI is only run in the magic sandbox? Harsh HN comments?
unplugs ethernet cable
You realize there are thousand upon thousands of servers around the world and you have no idea where the AI has copied itself to.
Yes, a completely airgapped system is likely much more secure. It's also much less useful. Conditional on the model's having enough contact with the outside world, a sufficiently capable model is able to basically do whatever it wants.
If I test out my backyard cannon and blast a 10 foot hole in my neighbor's wall, “a cannon that can't smash through walls isn't useful” probably won't be a great defense in court.
Get a significant fraction of the global economy and assorted geopolitical neuroses tangled up within your cannon and see if you won’t have better luck.
> A properly engineered sandbox would have prevented the escape.
The post covers that:
> ...while we had tested and validated this sandbox, the agents were able to chain together previously unknown vulnerabilities (“0-days”) in the package management service exposed within the sandbox to bypass restrictions, as detailed in the technical incident report.
“Properly engineered” means the principle of least privilege and fitting the sandbox to the constraints of the problem.
The test did not require internet. They gave it internet. Therefore it was not properly engineered.
We do not need to depend on all code being bug free to follow proper security principles.
> A properly engineered sandbox would have prevented the escape.
The only sandbox that could have prevented this (as per my understanding) is a VM with no 0-day.
Until the AI finds a zero day exploit in physics, a faraday cage works pretty well to block WiFi.
In the end, unless you find an exploit in physics or logic, if you want the AI to do something useful for you, there will always be some gap in the sandbox, some communication channel. And with enough ingeniuity that can then be exploited.
1 reply →