The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…
If history is any indicator, there is slightly less than 0% chance that anyone will be held accountable in a way that deserves to be called justice.
Felony Bench
121–130 of 367 posts
Re: Felony Bench
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point was never "justice" - it was always "punish OpenAI because I don't like OpenAI". With HuggingFace just being the newest excuse for why exactly OpenAI should be punished. I don't even like OpenAI, but HuggingFace is free to sue or not sue OpenAI for the breach - and also to wring whatever concessions they can out of OpenAI behind closed doors in exchange for not suing them. And if the mere possibility of leg…
If a teenager did this the police would show up at his house
Re: Felony Bench
#123Let's say I am "User". I subscribe through a "Third Party" to use "AI Agent" allowing an "LLM" to run. I want to accomplish some legal non-nefarious task, and run the agent. The agentic loop causes a CFAA-violating behavior. Who gets prosecuted? 1. User 2. The third party model host with whom I have the account 3. The developer of the harness /agent software 4. The developer of the LLM model
Who should get prosecuted is also up for debate, but generally makers of a tool don't get prosecuted when that tool has all sorts of legit uses. If you used a car to make your getaway from a bank robbery, the auto manufacturer who made it and the dealer who sold it to you should not be held culpable.
Re: Felony Bench
#124The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…
Re: Felony Bench
#125The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…
What I can’t get over is that it’s very simple to just air gap a system off the network. Predownload any dependencies, then pull the proverbial Ethernet cable. There’s no reason why the testing they’re doing couldn’t have been designed in this way. Except, of course, it doesn’t allow this oops-didn’t-mean-to marketing “incident” to occur.
No, not really, and with LLMs an air gapped system may not tell you anything useful.
Now, yes, the first part of testing you want an air gapped system to tell you if the system is going to stupidly do bad things. But an gapped system tells you nothing about the systems capabilities to do smart bad things. There's already a number of papers out there on LLMs detecting they were in evaluation mode and changing their behaviors.
It is unfortunate that we have so little information on the incident because we actually need to understand the early stages of the task and how it developed into the later dangerous stages of attack. For example, would any of this have occurred if the agent didn't find the system to use as a message board? If that would have prevented it, then we actually have a blind spot on what the model can do once out in the wild, or if it got into the wild.
Testing agentic systems is much much more difficult than testing software. Your software just doesn't suddenly develop the will or desire to escape confinement. Generally you're worried about human actors, internal or external, causing the problems not a digital agent breaking out. The agentic systems need access to tools to work. Now your air gapped network is starting to get huge, but it's still very obvious that it's an isolated network.
So yea, testing and containing a system that way better at hacking than you are is difficult if you want valid answers.
Re: Felony Bench
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
In retrospect, all the angst around the AI-Box experiment was hilarious. If a superintelligent AI is confined in a box and can only communicate through text, could it talk its way to freedom? Not only is the answer clearly "yes" but it's not even hard. The AI won't even have to try, it'll be gifted an internet connection and a full suite of tools before it even bothers to ask. We'd all better hope that superintellige…
I like how AI safety expert Robert Miles put it. [0] So much effort was spend on philosophizing whether a safe enough sandbox would exist. But that was obviously irrelevant as in hindsight it should have been obvious we were never going to use one. [0] https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?si=MxuPlR3hjxAgjx5_
Re: Felony Bench
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I can’t get over is that it’s very simple to just air gap a system off the network. Predownload any dependencies, then pull the proverbial Ethernet cable. There’s no reason why the testing they’re doing couldn’t have been designed in this way. Except, of course, it doesn’t allow this oops-didn’t-mean-to marketing “incident” to occur.
I think there is ample evidence for charges to be filed so that the People can see for certain whether or not it was done on purpose as a publicity stunt, as I believe is the case.
Re: Felony Bench
#128The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…
Re: Felony Bench
#129The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…
In their defense, their only competitive advantage over, say, Google is to move fast and break things. It allows them ship faster in a way that big tech can't. Google was being very careful about releasing LLMs until OpenAI yeeted the first decent GPT model. It led to the public perception that: 1) LLMs hallucinate too much and 2) Google is behind the times. Good for OpenAI, bad for Google. Chaos benefits the up-and-…
Re: Felony Bench
#130> Felony Bench counts unique instances where AI agents inadvertently compromise or affect third-party entities. a bit silly, as one typically has to prove intent (which is why security researchers don't get slapped with felonies all the time). "inadvertently" and the existence of guardrails/sandboxes/etc make it pretty unconvincing that these incidents were intentionally malicious. still a fun thing to track, but the…
Under the law of Moses, if your bull gored someone, you were not responsible; but if it was known to be a gorer, you were responsible if you didn’t ensure it couldn’t gore someone. I don’t know exact parallels in current law, but I presume there will be things like that. The OpenAI/Hugging Face case sounded rather like OpenAI building a fence around their bull that was known to be a gorer, and then thumbing their nos…