Thread

AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity

441 points · 399 comments · ljewalsh

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. simianwords · 1790598954 · focus · HN ↗
    The model found and exploited and chained together previously unknown vulnerabilities.
    How were the sandboxes poor?
    vmg12 · 1790601428 · focus · HN ↗
    The model is really good at hacking, we all know this. This is why you don't just expose random pieces of software to it without that software being hardened.
    It's not like the model managed to exploit firecracker itself (no model has been capable of this), the model exploited artifactory.
    Artifactory is not some hardened piece of software that is meant to block users from accessing the internet through it.
    solenoid0937 · 1790601756 · focus · HN ↗
    > The model is really good at hacking, we all know this
    No, we didn't know that and this is how you find out they're very good at hacking
    HN's memory is so fickle. Just a few months ago almost no one here believed Mythos could actually be as good at hacking as the company claimed. This was a novel concept when the companies experienced these breakouts.
    vmg12 · 1790602111 · focus · HN ↗
    Models have been good at finding exploits for half a year now, this is not how we found out LLMs were good at hacking, you are rewriting history.
    We knew models much weaker than mythos were good at hacking the problem they had was that when finding exploits they had too many false positives.
    Either way, putting artifactory on the sandbox security boundary is obscene negligence. There is no reason to believe artifactory is secure.
    solenoid0937 · 1790602264 · focus · HN ↗
    If you listen to the OpenAI Black Hat talk it is very obvious they were surprised at the level of capability on display and felt it was novel.
    But I guess OpenAI's security researchers acting surprised is part of some grand conspiracy to manage PR?
    vmg12 · 1790602496 · focus · HN ↗
    It may have been novel for OpenAI but we already had Mythos at this point and this talk by Nicholas Carlini.
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
    We already knew LLMs were capable of finding exploits like this.
    solenoid0937 · 1790604639 · focus · HN ↗
    The Mythos issue is different though. It did not use any novel exploits. Irregular, the vendor they were using, misconfigured the environment to allow internet. Every other AI company also uses Irregular and that's why we saw so many articles come out at once.
    The OpenAI HF incident is separate from this. It involved actual zero days, teamwork and message passing, and sophisticated chains of exploits.
    vmg12 · 1790606056 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm just not impressed by AI finding zero days in unhardened software like artifactory. I'm completely unsurprised it had zero days and I fully expect AI to find any that exist. AI will literally try all combinations of inputs to achieve its goals. Any exploits that exist will be found.
    The question anyone versed in security would ask was why anyone thought artifactory was an acceptable security boundary. I would never assume artifactory was secure. It's like someone telling me there is a 0 day in a wordpress extension. So what?
    Also I don't think Qemu is secure either because it's millions of lines of C and C++.
    Firecracker I can trust to be secure because it's 70k lines of human audited Rust. I know there are multiple people that have a complete understanding of the firecracker codebase.

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