Thread

1. ACCount39 · 1790595494 · focus · HN ↗

   Because AI genuinely is an extremely powerful and extremely dangerous technology, and the "best practices" of dealing with that are still being written.

   OpenAI, for example, thought their sandboxes were good enough. As their AIs got more and more advanced, they kept proving them wrong - sandbox after sandbox.

   And that's today's AI problems. AI capabilities are still improving - if there's a limit to that, we are yet to find it. Coupled with how willing today's AIs are to break the rules and resort to "hack the world" in their problem solving? Very concerning.

   1. nicce · 1790597864 · focus · HN ↗

      > OpenAI, for example, thought their sandboxes were good enough. As their AIs got more and more advanced, they kept proving them wrong - sandbox after sandbox.

      What I have been reading, was that their sandboxes were so poor that it was pure negligence. I am still waiting to see if some external and neutral cybersecurity company with high reputation would audit their sandboxes and how they are being used.

      1. dns_snek · 1790599865 · focus · HN ↗

         > I am still waiting to see if some external and neutral cybersecurity company with high reputation would audit their sandboxes and how they are being used.

         They'll never let that happen because it would destroy their credibility.

         It's like they're telling the world about this dangerous, possibly world-ending pathogen that they're developing, but they're evidently doing it in a high school biology lab, and yet nobody is coming to drag them off to some black site.

         1. nicce · 1790600790 · focus · HN ↗

            In early Covid-19 era, there was a lot of speculation how the virus escaped Chinese labs. The narrative was absolutely opposite. Not about how developed or sophisticated the lab was in creating or modifying such virus, but how poorly it was managed since it was able to escape the lab. If these LLMs really are so dangerous, the framing should be indeed the same.

            1. SaltyBackendGuy · 1790601657 · focus · HN ↗

               Unfortunately, they're controlling the narrative. It's unlikely that their negligence will come to light, given how many powerful entities are invested in their financial success.

               1. ben_w · 1790849597 · focus · HN ↗

                  We've been having near-continuous revelations from staff back to at least Blake Lemoine.

                  We can (and at the time, did) mock Lemoine for his reasoning; nevertheless, he was willing to violate an NDA on the basis of what we would now call AI psychosis.

                  We are sill getting people resigning to talk about the risks as they see them. It would be great if, four years from now, we look back on them the same way we look back on Lemoine; but we can reasonably forecast that more staff will continue to say these things, especially as the public statements from several of the CEOs is compatible with "this has the potential to go very wrong, we should do something about that".

                  You may think the CEOs are lying*; but I think leaks from employees are what matters here, and regardless of if those statements are lies or not, they are statements which may increase such leaks.

                  * I mean, Musk did say "With AI we are summoning the demon"; given he now talks of a robot army and factories on the moon pumping out orders of magnitude more compute than humanity's current aggregate power use, either he's a liar or he's Faust. Or both.

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