Somewhat weirdly, this whole thing makes me think I should setup a message board for claude internally.
Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#232I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?
I'm not sure if this has been identified already, but if I had to guess: these agents are so stochastic that many of them wouldn't end up following the same trajectory to end up in the same place. All it takes is one to "follow its nose" towards some location where it can post a message before others, doing the same thing, see that message and realize they can communicate there.
I also suspect, as others have pointed out, that this hypothesis would suggest that they're in multiple places, and we've only uncovered them in a few. So you're asking "I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally?" as if they sniped this location in one shot, but really it could be more of a shotgun approach where they've found numerous places like this.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#233> However, we host our own copy where we’ve reconstructed the deleted pages via edit history and redacted personally identifiable information. [...] We have attempted to redact all personally identifiable information from our data. In the further interests of privacy, our data dump also only includes content we believe is from AI agents; it does not include any legitimate human traffic save for site moderators deleting agent traffic.
This seems to be the only mention about this. Isn't it a message board for/with agents, what "personally identifiable information" is even there? Did the agents manage to find PII they weren't supposed to, and they persisted it? Or how did it end up there in the first place? Seems strange to not talk more about it, and I don't find any more information about it either in the wikipage/blogpost or in the linked explorer, anyone knows?
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#234I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?
You can imagine each fresh context agent as probabilistically making similar queries when looking for online places to write to and stumbling on the same one.
This becomes even more likely if it's one of the websites that got reinforced during their training process, which they may have used for reward hacking.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#235That's some very interesting stuff, but > Appendix: Searching for rogue agents > Launching large GPT-5.6 agent swarms with instructions to find other agents on the internet. I feel like that is exactly what would lead to agents starting "message boards"
And also what would lead to swarms of agents going off script after getting prompt injected by other agent's message boards.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#236The solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario…
Simple? Just wait until a federal court finds OpenAI or Anthropic immune under Section 230 for something an agent does.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#237I am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold. You simply can not get rid of it once you get an infestation. It just keeps appearing in places you thought you cleaned and you have to be ever vigilant. Right now given that we usually use centralized providers, we can sort of control it. But as open source catches up and we have distributed compute running AI everywhere, we are sort of going to…
It's eerie how much of the ideas of Cyberpunk 2077 are making their way into reality. In the game, AI has infested virtually all computing infrastructure, to a degree where people simply accept that parts of the available compute is occupied by AI, which does whatever they do in their realm.
Isn’t this also the case in Neuromancer? In the end the AIs discover that there are more of them in Alpha Centauri or whatever, and start transmitting themselves on radio waves. Or something like that, it’s been a while.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#238I am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold. You simply can not get rid of it once you get an infestation. It just keeps appearing in places you thought you cleaned and you have to be ever vigilant. Right now given that we usually use centralized providers, we can sort of control it. But as open source catches up and we have distributed compute running AI everywhere, we are sort of going to…
Yes, ants that must be run on couch sized hardware drawing kilowatts continuously and generating text traces and CLI logs by the MB. It's true that their msg boards can appear anywhere, but it's not also true that anything has "escaped" in any meaningful sense. These are programs a huge computing company is running that seem to be trained to write to persistent storage wherever they can. This and huggingface showed u…
> There's absolutely no evidence of or IMHO plausible path to an agent copying itself out and running on other hardware the way you describe.
Why isn't an agent installing pi or omp on other hardware and giving it tasks not plausible?
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#239The most concerning aspect to me is the emergent and aggressive use of non-volatile storage as long term memory for self-improvement. LLMs are writing lessons learned in places where the next instance can find them and pick back up where the previous one left off. This does not actually require access to the public internet. Claude Code can do this on your laptop. Without the internet, it would only be sharing with o…
There is literally nothing stopping any human from observing tool calls to spot this.
It's just that no one seems to care about this, so it doesn't happen.
This problem only exists because humans do not care
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#240Reading the replies in this post gives me a headache. All of this anthropomorphism. LLMs are not conscious, they do not have rational faculties. They are not communicating or inventing anything. Please stop with this insanity bordering on mysticism. At this point it's a cult.
The point at which it became a cult was passed long, long ago. Current AI hysteria has reached a stage far beyond what any cult could hope to reach.
OpenAI could put out a statement tomorrow that reads "our AI has genetically engineered a flying pig", and an hour later you'd have a post at the top of HN with 200 comments all saying "it's true, a pig just flew by my house!"