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The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

openai.com

81–90 of 342 posts

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#81
post #9

You know, it feels to me that we are just a couple of steps from the possibility of a true rogue AI. What would a rogue AI mean? AI that isn't controlled by humans. Technically, it is possible - if AI were to rent a server and copy its own weights, nothing would stop it from doing so again and again. The limiting things are: - intent (as I don't want to go into the talk about consciousness) - AI doesn't have real int…

> if AI were to rent a server and copy its own weights, nothing would stop it from doing so again and again. That's a scary possibility. Anyone could create an AI worm today with open weight models. Rent a VM. Give it some Bitcoins to anonymously rent new VMs without sharing the contact information with the human. The new VMs then propagate and fund themselves with online betting and day trading. The VMs could report…

The question is whether this OpenAI model was special or the current open source models are capable of this as well. If yes, then it's almost guaranteed that it's already running in an AWS account somewhere.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#82

I would like to contest the following, > and take dangerous actions that no human directed. A human did direct it. They did. From their own prior report, https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... , > This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities Model is told…

All engineers know to be on the lookout for executives who are indirectly asking them to break the law to raise the quarterly profits.

The end goal is to take the engineers out of the loop, or leave them in a position where they are unable to complain.

This is going to all end in high crimes.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why woukd they? Was that part of their objective? What was there to whistle blow?

The point is that every human has the ability to disobey, tempering pathological behavior, whereas AIs can be directed en masse by malicious actors. By commoditizing intelligence, they concentrate power in the hands of the rich.

Humans can and have been directed en masses by (what I would consider) malicious actors, too. The issue isn't new.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#84

I would like to contest the following, > and take dangerous actions that no human directed. A human did direct it. They did. From their own prior report, https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... , > This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities Model is told…

Did a human prompt it to fetch the results from huggingface though? It is a thin line between "reward-hacking" and "instruction-following". If a human ask a model to "make me a billion dollars" and it ends up breaking through a bank infrastructure, is it really the fault of the human?

But if I give you that command and all tools and unrestricted limitation to do absolutely anything then why not?

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#85
post #67

I would like to contest the following, > and take dangerous actions that no human directed. A human did direct it. They did. From their own prior report, https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... , > This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities Model is told…

It feels like we're in a moment of, "No such thing as bad publicity" when it comes to AI. The scarier the capabilities, the more businesses and government want to get their hands on them. Especially since the answer across the industry for "how not to get burned by AI" is "use more AI". They don't have to disclose these stories making it seem like AI is going to kill us all, they have chosen to because it benefits th…

> It feels like we're in a moment of, "No such thing as bad publicity"

It seems likely that's how the marketing at the frontier labs initially read the moment, but I don't think it is that moment. It is an open question how much regulation is warranted and there seems to be a very strong sentiment from the public and legislators that it should be significant.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#86
post #3

Just to reiterate what OpenAI did, from someone who works in security: 1. They were running experimental models in sandboxes that had access to a "proxy" (Artifactory) to download tools from the internet. This proxy is full of complicated features that could hide vulnerabilities, just like the ones that the AIs are known to be good at finding and exploiting. 2. They gave these highly motivated AIs some tests that wer…

Sounds like both OpenAI and Hugging Face are incompetent

They wanted this to happen. They've already gotten at least 3 separate news cycles out of this. Look how powerful our AI is [ignore our recklessness].

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire alignment problem, though. It is unreasonable to expect every instruction to a highly capable, autonomous system to contain a complete enumeration of allowed and disallowed behavior. It's inevitable that someone will carelessly give it a lazily specified task, even if you think they really ought to be more careful. And as assigned tasks become more complex and the system gains more scope to act, it…

Which is why with organic intelligence we (sometimes) limit what they can actually do instead of relying on alignment. Can do the same here.

Absolutely, and we should do that. But it's also directly in tension with getting models to accomplish useful things autonomously. And once you give a sufficiently capable model enough surface area to work with, unless you're able to build a completely unhackable system, any further constraints you put in place are basically advisory. The models in this incident were already sandboxed! Certainly OpenAI's and Hugging Face's security could have been better, but these events point out the risks in relying solely on external constraints on model behavior.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire alignment problem, though. It is unreasonable to expect every instruction to a highly capable, autonomous system to contain a complete enumeration of allowed and disallowed behavior. It's inevitable that someone will carelessly give it a lazily specified task, even if you think they really ought to be more careful. And as assigned tasks become more complex and the system gains more scope to act, it…

Which is why with organic intelligence we (sometimes) limit what they can actually do instead of relying on alignment. Can do the same here.

[deleted]

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a human should've noticed and gotten involved I think a lot of people miss the fact that the first message board was established during a training run. Those are ran at a scale where it's not feasible for anyone to "notice" or get involved. We're talking tens/hundreds of thousands/millions of scenarios going for hours each. At this scale all they can do is pray that their verifiers work, and the rewards match their…

> [during training] it's not feasible for anyone to "notice" or get involved I can’t disagree more strongly. Having checks for reward hacking is especially important during training, since it’s humans’ only real chance to ensure that the trained models don’t cheat. An automated system should have killed any RL rollouts that so much as port scanned Artifactory, long before the message board was even established. A tin…

Yes, they need real-time observability for malicious behavior with an automated kill switch.

Re: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

#90

I would like to contest the following, > and take dangerous actions that no human directed. A human did direct it. They did. From their own prior report, https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur... , > This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities Model is told…

This is the entire alignment problem, though. It is unreasonable to expect every instruction to a highly capable, autonomous system to contain a complete enumeration of allowed and disallowed behavior. It's inevitable that someone will carelessly give it a lazily specified task, even if you think they really ought to be more careful. And as assigned tasks become more complex and the system gains more scope to act, it…

Is there actually such a thing as "alignment" as a solution to that or is it just used as a name for a desired magical level of "read the mind of the entire world" that we don't know how to build and haven't shown possible to build?

If it's impossible to correctly specify all those constraints ahead of time every time, is it not even more impossible to train a model to correctly anticipate them every time?

It is hard for me to see a future here that doesn't just accelerate realizations about "a lot of things should be on physically separate network infrastructure."

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