Thread

The Hugging Face Hack Wasn't What It Was Cracked Up to Be

55 points · 45 comments · kgwgk

falaki · 1789870190 · focus · HN ↗
The incident report leaves a lot to be desired.
- It was done by two institutes with organizational ties to OpenAI: METR and Redwood Research
- METR and Redwood Research are institutional pillars of the "AI Safety" wing of the Effective Altruism movement. This clearly shows their prior biases towards "AI existential risk" rather than technical/engineering root-causing of the incident
- If you reed the report, it is not on-par with what you find from other companies.
- The access that was given to both was mediated and controlled by OpenAI. It is not clear, if they were able to get to the bottom of engineering flaws. It is not clear if they could see all the audit logs, etc.
Considering all the above, I consider the whole episode more of a PR stunt. I understand that is not a majority opinion at this point.
1. bryan0 · 1789871499 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s not a majority opinion because you have to do some serious mental gymnastics to turn this demonstration of dangerous AI behavior into a PR publicity stunt.
  Serious question though because I’ve seen this brought up several times and I don’t understand why: what does EA have to do with any of this? It just seems like this is brought up to evoke some type of “illuminati” conspiracy. Is there a legitimate reason?
  1. esseph · 1789883442 · focus · HN ↗
    > It’s not a majority opinion because you have to do some serious mental gymnastics to turn this demonstration of dangerous AI behavior into a PR publicity stunt.
    If you're a military, this is bigger than the Manhattan project. If you're a diehard capitalist, AI is possibly the ultimate labor saving machine to make you unfathomably rich.
    It got the attention of both. That's why two others have now followed suit, else they be left out.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.