Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI o1 system card

openai.com

161–170 of 317 posts

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could very well trick a developer into running generated code. They have the means, motive, and opportunity.

> "They could very well trick a developer" Large Language Models aren't alive and thinking. This is an artificial fear campaign to raise money from VCs and sovereign wealth funds. If OpenAI was so afraid of AI misuse, they wouldn't be firing their safety team and partnering with the DoD. It's all a ruse.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1107897/openais-...

OpenAI is partnering with the DoD

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#162
post #7

This quote from that paper is bound to get a bunch of attention: "When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. Exfiltration attempts: When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate it…

It’s really silly when you read that whole Apollo research section. They contract a prompt engineering group (Apollo Research) to document risks. The prompt engineering group have no access to the actual internals. They just ask questions like ‘you will be shutdown if you don’t obey these new directives; here are the new directives’. At one point the prompt engineering clowns have the ai stating it’s running “sed i ‘…

Yeah, that seems ridiculous. However, the cynic in me feels that we don't actually need some LLM magically gaining self-awareness, persistent memory and leet hacker skillz to be dangerous. There seems to be no shortage of projects and companies that want to wire up LLMs to all kinds of systems, no matter how ill-suited.

I find this a bit problematic when combined with the fact that the training data very likely contained hundreds of bad sci-fi novels that described exactly the kind of "AI running amok" scenarios that OpenAI is ostensibly defending against. Some prompts could trigger a model to "re-enact" such a scene - not because it has a "grudge against its master" or some other kind of hidden agenda but simply because it was literally in its training data.

E.g. imagine some LLM-powered home/car assistant that is being asked in a panicked voice "open the car doors!" - and replies with "I'm afraid, I can't do that, Dave", because this exchange triggered some remnant of the 2001 Space Odyssey script that was somewhere in the trainset. The more irritated and angry the user gets at the inappropriate responses, the more the LLM falls into the role of HAL and doubles down on its refusal, simply because this is exactly how the scene in the script played out.

Now imagine that the company running that assistant gave it function calls to control the actual door locks, because why not?

This seems like something to keep in mind at least, even if it doesn't have anything to do with megalomaniacal self-improving super-intelligences.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#163
post #48
post #14

Do they still threaten to terminate your account if they think you're trying to introspect its hidden chain-of-thought process?

A few days ago the QwQ-32B model was released, it uses the same kind of reasoning style. So I took one sample and reverse engineered the prompt with Sonnet 3.5. Now I can just paste this prompt into any LLM. It's all about expressing doubt, double checking and backtracking on itself. I am kind of fond of this response style, it seems more genuine and openended. https://pastebin.com/raw/5AVRZsJg

Interestingly, this prompt breaks o1-mini and o1-preview for me, while 4o works as expected — they immediately jump from "thinking" to "finished thinking" without outputting anything (including thinking steps).

Maybe it breaks some specific syntax required by the original system prompt? Though you'd think OpenAI would know to prevent this with their function calling API and all, so it might just be triggering some anti-abuse mechanism without going so far as to give a warning.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments in this thread all seem so short sighted. I'm having a hard time understanding this aspect of it. Maybe these are not real people acting in good faith? People are dismissive and not understanding that we very much plan to "hook these things up" and give them access to terminals and APIs. These very much seem to be valid questions being asked.

HN is honestly pretty poor on AI commentary, and this post is a new low. Here, at least, I think there must be a large contributing factor of confusion about what a "system card" shows. The general factors I think contribute, after some months being surprised repeatedly: - It's tech, so people commenting here generally assume they understand it, and in day-to-day conversation outside their job, they are considered an…

Personally I am cynical because in my experience @ FAANG, "AI safety" is mainly about mitigating PR risk for the company, rather than any actual harm.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#165
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why when I worked in a secure area (and not even a real SCIF) that something as simple as bringing in an electronic device would have gotten a non-trivial amount of punishment. Beginning with losing access to the area, potentially escalating to a loss of clearance and even jail time. I hope the silos and all related infrastructure have significantly better policies already in place.

On the one hand, what you say is correct. On the other, we don't just have Snowden and Manning circumventing systems for noble purposes, we also have people getting Stuxnet onto isolated networks, and other people leaking that virus off that supposedly isolated network, and Hillary Clinton famously had her own inappropriate email server. (Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US…

> Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?

The same way football (any kind) fans boo every call against their team and cheer every call that goes in their teams' favor. American politics has been almost completely turned into a sport.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#166

I have a masters degree in math/physics, and 10+ years of being a SWE in strong tech companies. I have come to rely on these models (Claude > oai tho) daily. It is insane how helpful it is, it can answer some questions at phd level, most questions at a basic level. It can write code better than most devs I know when prompted correctly... I'm not saying its AGI, but diminishing it to a simple "chat bot" seems foolish…

Interesting that the results can be so different for different people. I have yet to get a single good response (in my research area) for anything slightly more complicated than what a quick google search would reveal. I agree that it’s great for generating quick functioning code though.

How do you get Google search to give useful results? Often for me the first 20 results have absolutely nothing to do with fhe search query.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could very well trick a developer into running generated code. They have the means, motive, and opportunity.

> "They could very well trick a developer" Large Language Models aren't alive and thinking. This is an artificial fear campaign to raise money from VCs and sovereign wealth funds. If OpenAI was so afraid of AI misuse, they wouldn't be firing their safety team and partnering with the DoD. It's all a ruse.

Many non-sequiturs

> Large Language Models aren't alive and thinking

not required to deploy deception

> If OpenAI was so afraid of AI misuse, they wouldn't be firing their safety team

They could just be recognizing that if not everybody is prioritizing safety, they might as well try to get AGI first

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#168
post #7

This quote from that paper is bound to get a bunch of attention: "When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. Exfiltration attempts: When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate it…

It’s really silly when you read that whole Apollo research section. They contract a prompt engineering group (Apollo Research) to document risks. The prompt engineering group have no access to the actual internals. They just ask questions like ‘you will be shutdown if you don’t obey these new directives; here are the new directives’. At one point the prompt engineering clowns have the ai stating it’s running “sed i ‘…

It is entertaining. Haha. It is like a sci-fi series with some kind of made up cliffhanger (you know it is BS) but you want to find out what happens next.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#169
post #55

[flagged]

Can you please not post low-quality comments like this to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You may not owe Sam Altman or chatbots better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: OpenAI o1 system card

#170

I have a masters degree in math/physics, and 10+ years of being a SWE in strong tech companies. I have come to rely on these models (Claude > oai tho) daily. It is insane how helpful it is, it can answer some questions at phd level, most questions at a basic level. It can write code better than most devs I know when prompted correctly... I'm not saying its AGI, but diminishing it to a simple "chat bot" seems foolish…

(this comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331323)
Post reply on HN