Thread

OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites

132 points · 196 comments · Betelbuddy

gizajob · 1790444203 · focus · HN ↗
Getting bored of these framings where the superintelligent sentient beings running freely inside OpenAI are doing things that the company has no control over. The headline should be:
OpenAI meddled with multiple US Government agency sites.
The bots are acting neither properly nor improperly, they’re acting as they’re being allowed or coordinated to act.
1. theptip · 1790447319 · focus · HN ↗
  Curious, why do you find it so objectionable to state that OpenAI has out-of-control agents?
  1. gleenn · 1790447451 · focus · HN ↗
    Because it furthers the idea of a rogue agent and places responsibility and blame where it belongs, on the people running the company.
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790447593 · focus · HN ↗
    These ideas aren't mutually exclusive. You can blame a person for creating a rogue agent.
    dgellow · 1790448225 · focus · HN ↗
    There was no rogue agent. That’s the whole point
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790448647 · focus · HN ↗
    Person: "AI, please make me paperclips."
    AI: "OK, I've now converted the entire planet into paperclips."
    Alien observer #1: "Wow, that was a rogue AI!"
    Alien observer #2: "False. We need to place the blame where it belongs, on the person who requested the paperclips."
    Ultimately this type of terminology dispute has a tendency to miss the point.
    windexh8er · 1790456091 · focus · HN ↗
    It does, indeed. Because OAI is not just a singular person, as in your scenario. No single person has access to controlling agents at the scale OAI has. Let's not conflate Frontier providers with "Person".
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790457309 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not exactly sure why you think this distinction is so important. I think my point stands if you replace "Person" with "OpenAI". In any case, I presume the swarms OpenAI has been researching will be available to the general public before too long.
    windexh8er · 1790460927 · focus · HN ↗
    It makes a big difference: individuals do not have the capabilities to run millions of dollars of opportunistic hacking loop inference. That's why the distinction is important, they are not the same thing you've conflated them down to.
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790462129 · focus · HN ↗
    "AI has gotten cheaper more quickly than any other transformative technology in history. The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. That price drop is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity."
    <a href="https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought" rel="nofollow">https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
    windexh8er · 1790482048 · focus · HN ↗
    There's two things here: 1) you clearly don't understand the argument and 2) LLMs are one of the few technologies that doesn't get any cheaper as it scales (totality, not just the cherry picked inference efficiency argument you've tried to make). In fact it gets more expensive because it scales linearly with demand and resources aren't infinite, as I'd hope you could understand.
    Also, training costs are never ending so a model that costs 10s of millions of dollars may never yield a profit based on the hardware spend, training time and lack of inference profits before a better model hits the market.
    If you're not living under a rock one knows that data center availability for inference currently has low supply and hardware (GPUs specifically) that have been purchased have nowhere to be run and even if they did there's often a lack of power to supply. Why do you think the entire force majeure has taken place with Oracle as of recent?
    The unit price of a fixed slice of yesterday's intelligence may be collapsing (~10x/year) as you've argued, all while the total cost of AI is increasing: training the frontier (2.4x/year), building the infrastructure (+77%/year), enterprise bills (3.2x/year), the electricity (+54%/year in the largest US grid), the components (+400% DRAM), and the macro footprint (92% of GDP growth) is rising at an astronomical rate on every measurable point. Epoch / Stanford clearly stated this years ago and it's only getting worse. But if one can't see we're in one of the largest CapEx bubbles [1] of all time... o_O
    Copying and pasting a few lines that represents a miniscule fraction of the LLM conundrum. That'll show 'em!
    [0] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21015" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21015 [1] <a href="https://siliconanalysts.com/analysis/hyperscaler-ai-capex-depreciation-wall-2026" rel="nofollow">https://siliconanalysts.com/analysis/hyperscaler-ai-capex-de...
    windexh8er · 1790514724 · focus · HN ↗
    The down votes with no response because people don't like to look at the bigger picture. Enjoy the brigade, it seems to represent the state of HN these days.
    jacquesm · 1790460871 · focus · HN ↗
    That legal fiction works both ways.
    windexh8er · 1790461134 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    jacquesm · 1790461252 · focus · HN ↗
    You could have asked for that more gracefully.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
    windexh8er · 1790461414 · focus · HN ↗
    Check the mirror. And, with that link I think you've missed the point entirely, a tad too literal of an interpretation. But thanks for trying.

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