Comment by epihelix
18 hours ago
The larger issue with the HF incident is that before it occurred, OAI already knew the agents were exploiting Artifactory, turning it into a message board and then gaining full internet access through it. OAI's response to discovering this was not to airgap the test, but instead to simply block that particular Artifactory exploit, rebuild, and then resume. That's ... nuts.
Oh, and after resuming the tests, the Artifactory message board was reestablished almost immediately, but it took a number of days to fully breach HF. In all that time, after seeing Artifactory compromised the first time, nobody even bothered to check if those naughty agents were at it again.
This is all documented by OAI, with a timeline, here:
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
To know that there was a serious weakness in the sandbox, and to just patch an exploit and resume with nothing else changed and no monitoring, in a test where all guardrails were off, the bots were thirsty for some internet juice, and Artifactory was a clear target? This is where even a half-skilled human should have decided that this wasn't a great idea.
The more you look into the details of this thing, the more it does your head in.
Probably wasn’t a human operator at all that detected this. Just someone’s agent saying “I noticed there’s messages on the artifactory and the agents are communicating, here’s the fix I propose” from someone’s codex, skim read and someone just going “yeah sure go ahead”
It's irresponsible to a degree that it should have some very serious consequences but I highly doubt anything at all will come of it.
That website makes it look like they're so proud of what happened. I don't think it was 100% deliberate, but they really were not concerned about their models doing something shady
They LOVE the PR and the “danger” angle bc it makes them feel powerful. Dont think too much about the psychology…
> The larger issue with the HF incident is that before it occurred, OAI already knew the agents were exploiting Artifactory, turning it into a message board and then gaining full internet access through it. OAI's response to discovering this was not to airgap the test, but instead to simply block that particular Artifactory exploit, rebuild, and then resume. That's ... nuts.
This annoys me so much. Everyone is acting as if the model went rogue, when it really did exactly what it's been trained for. This story is so fucking engineered.
Those PR stunts are the paperclips we cannot stop.