Comment by ACCount39
2 hours ago
The amount of sandboxing an average production AI deployment uses is slightly above a zero.
If AI is a hacking hazard even with non-zero sandboxing, because it can and will go off the rails and try to break out of your sandbox? If you got yourself an AI that even at test time will act like 3 career cybercriminals in a trenchcoat? The issue isn't the sandbox quality.
The issue is that AI is both capable of, and willing to punch its way out of sandboxes unprompted.
That "capable" is only ever going to get worse, because AIs are going to become more and more capable over time. That "willing"? It goes directly to a very nasty, very foundational problem of "how do we make our AI be nice in general". That's an open unsolved problem.
That's the problem that NEEDS to be solved, or at least improved upon, before we build even more capable AIs. Sandbox quality is a distraction. It might hold the problems back by a little. It gives an extra safety margin. But a "test time" AI is eventually deployed, and then the sandbox doesn't help at all.
> The issue isn't the sandbox quality... The issue is that AI is both capable of, and willing to punch its way out of sandboxes unprompted.
Orly?
Do tell me how the LLM-based tool running on a bunch of computers attached to the network described in [0] can punch its way out to the Internet. Do make careful note of footnote 0 in that comment before replying.
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862136>
Sandbox quality was always, always a distraction.
Let's say the sandbox holds. It's a perfect, ideal sandbox! It's not even in the same universe as the rest of the internet. There's absolutely no way for the AI to escape!
Thus, "the unknown unreleased AI involved in the HuggingFace incident" doesn't actually hack HuggingFace. Because it can't! It evaluates a bit worse, but makes it all the way to release unimpeded, and becomes "GPT-6 Astra".
Then a web developer in Brazil gives his $100/mo Codex root access on his AWS instance, and a poorly worded prompt to go with it. And that "GPT-6 Astra" is still willing to go hack something at the slightest excuse. So we get the HuggingFace incident all over again. Except this time, it's a random developer in Brazil who gets blamed, and billed, and probably sued too.
You can't and shouldn't rely on a sandbox. An AI that's only safe if you keep it in the world's most ideal perfect sandbox is a disaster waiting to happen.
That's nice and all, but the topic under discussion is how the major LLM manufacturers removed the safeties from their computer-attacking tools and tested those tools on a network with Internet access.
This might have gone okay if they weren't testing to see how well the tools attack computers, but, well, that's what they were testing at the time, so they ended up doing stuff that would get you or I time in Federal prison if we did it with tools we deployed.