Comment by hodgehog11

2 days ago

I love it when I hear all of this compounding evidence on this claim, because none of it is strictly wrong, but it misses the point, and lulls us into the feeling of having quick solutions available. Yes, the top execs are probably approaching things this way, but these labs are not that top down. There's too many things going on.

Here's a different idea: talk to the to the staff. Not the evil CEO, but the nerdy guy on the ground who graduated from a top university, wrote a few research papers, and got a job there. I have. They have rose-coloured glasses of the institution, and not a lot of life experience. They were never taught to be careful, and still don't really comprehend what they're working with. They don't see real danger, they see a toy, and they see research that is low-hanging fruit. What they are doing is basic stuff. They are not setting up proper sandboxes because they barely need to think at all. People seem to think that these are all amazing computer science experts working on highly advanced technology. They are not. OpenAI researchers see huge improvements on this gigantic toy, crazy behaviour, and they are enamored by it. "Oops, people are angry, so maybe I'll make a slightly better sandbox. Let me ask ChatGPT on how to do that." A more senior researcher would be horrified by how little effort they need to put in to get such terrifying results. Junior researchers think they're just top stuff.

But I appreciate your discussing how to isolate this stuff. I honestly don't think the OpenAI researchers I've spoken to are aware of this. (Anthropic is a totally different story, BTW.)

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hodgehog11

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simoncion  2 days ago

> ...talk to the to the staff. Not the evil CEO, but the nerdy guy on the ground who graduated from a top university...

Why would I talk to the people who don't have the power to set company policy and fire anyone who fails to comply with it? I've worked at several big companies over the years and have observed the only even vaguely reliable power that folks at the bottom have to change company policy that management substantially benefits from is to quit en mass.

> ...but it misses the point, and lulls us into the feeling of having quick solutions available.

The point is that these companies claim they're working on oh so dangerous tools that are very likely to kill us all, but the evidence that these companies don't behave even a little bit like this is true keeps pouring in.

The CEO [0] can set company policy. In the US, the CEO [0] can fire people who fail to comply with policy. Most folks would -correctly- think that a CEO of a company who is working on a tool that has a high chance of destroying humanity is very interested in not destroying humanity (accidentally or otherwise)... if for no other reason than the fact that once all of the humans are dead, his company can't make any more money!

> Junior researchers think they're just top stuff.

In sane companies, when a junior staff deletes the prod database, an investigation is launched to understand if the deletion was unintentional and -if it was- what about the company's procedures need to be fixed to make sure that that doesn't happen again. In sane companies, when one performs a live test of a tool that has

* been designed to attack computers

* been instructed to attack computers

* had its safeties removed

one ensures that this computer-attacking tool cannot attack computers that aren't owned by the company. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this... the fact that the computer-attacking tools could get out to the Internet is -at best- negligence. [1]

[0] ...and many-to-most managers in one's management chain...

[1] For a discussion of the decades-old techniques for preventing computers in datacenters from escaping logical airgapping see [2] and [3]

[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862373>

  • hodgehog11  2 days ago

    I agree with this almost completely (especially about sane companies, which I think we can all agree they are not), but I think it's important to separate the notion that these tools are potentially dangerous from the behaviour of the CEOs. The executives are there to make as much money as possible, that is all they care about. It's the researchers who are playing around with these things that are causing damage with them (aside from the damages from the data centers themselves, of course). They need to be better than this. It's not enough to blame senior leaders in this case, since they are clearly problematic. The junior staff share responsibility now too.

    > OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this

    Anthropic, yes. For OpenAI, not in the way you might think. Most senior staff are research scientists who have likely not even thought about sandboxing and cybersecurity in their lives. They outcompete the rest. That's why so many of their "safety" staff left for Anthropic; the culture at OpenAI has never cared for these sorts of topics.