Comment by Topfi
17 hours ago
I am struggling to see how "oops, our models consistently escape sandboxing and did major intrusions into third-parties" is a better comms strat vs Anthropics (who mind you, also had models attacking third-parties in a much more limited, but I feel still egregious manner, which shouldn't happen or be possible even once, but at least they seem to change their approach upon that information).
Imagine, for a second, if the Hugging Face incident happened at a lab that did not talk like Anthropic but also wasn't US-based such as Z.AI, DeepSeek or Moonshot. Think their rhetoric would mean no one would care?
> just got to releasing incremental improvements, everything was perfectly fine.
Maybe missing something, but the only incremental release before and after the Anthropic restrictions got lifted was Fable 5.1, released three days ago.
I don't think anybody is saying there won't be downsides to LLMs. Tech always comes with downsides, often quite extreme. Cars are a vivid example where even after a century of safety improvements, around a million people are still killed by them every year, to say nothing of climate stuff and other secondary or indirect issues. And that price is all just so we can get between places a bit more quickly and conveniently, yet we collectively deem that as an acceptable cost to pay for what we get.
By contrast LLMs have a long-term potential to provide vastly greater benefit to society by gradually automating most of all basic cognitive work. And what price are we paying for such? Some sites are getting hacked, some people are getting scammed, governments will improve self targeting abilities of weapons, and so on.
In reality the biggest downside will probably come in the form of the transition window as such automation creates a new economic equilibrium, akin to what happened after the industrial revolution. But none of these problems are anything like existential in nature. And when contrasted against what we stand to gain, they are basically negligible in the longrun. Hyperbolizing the negatives was unnecessary and self destructive.
How is posting messages on a message board a "major intrusion"? Or are you purely talking about the HF incident?
"into third-parties". Yeah, HF was meant by that. Also why I mentioned Anthropic also having intrusions outside their lab [0]. Theirs were not merely as extensive or long coordinated (as far as we know), yet I feel strongly all the same that neither should happen given the safety focus that both labs purport.
Mind you, unintended/unauthorised "message board" also is just a nice, euphemistic way, to describe what happened in a manner that, thinking about it, is likely in the interest of OpenAI as it can make the severity and effort taken sound less than it was. The OpenAI models didn't use any actual, sanctioned platform to exchange messages in a manner the lab expected or planned for. They used directory names (in one instance) to exchange messages including sharing exploits, they created something akin to a message board via exploits, which if we are honest and very strict, could also be seen as intrusion, albeit inside the org. If I broke into my employers server and left message somewhere for another to find, that'd also be intrusion in the general sense.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber...
If applicants for an elite college or internship program at a FAANG company were found to have colluded in this way to cheat on a test/interview, I suspect that it would be a pretty major scandal.
Why should we let equivalent fraudulent behavior from a non human system - that explicitly shouldn’t do this - slide?
I'm not saying it should be let to slide, but I'm not a fan of the hyperbole surrounding this event. They've already faced significant heat for the HF incident, I think they've learned their lesson. But this is now just being used to drum up fear, which can only mean one thing: Less access for you, more access for the privileged class. The biggest threat we face is centralization of power. OpenAI are one of the good ones because they're actually pushing for everybody to have a fair share of access to the frontier, not just a small privileged elite of billionaires, politicians and megacorp executives. If Anthropic got their way, we'd all be using a censored watered down slop-pistol while they swallow the Earth's economy and enslave us all. I'm sure they'll be investing considerable resources into ensuring that this "news" makes the mainstream media cycle as prominently as imaginable.
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