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GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

openai.com

61–70 of 114 posts

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#61
I've been getting lots of refusals by Codex with GPT 5.5 for "biosafety reasons" when asking for harmless things like code to analyze SARS-CoV-2 sequences for breakpoints. That's in no way useful for creating viruses whatsoever - it's pure research.

It's annoying that the refusal is so obviously false positive.

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#63

They ran a bounty on Kaggle last year but with $500k in payouts and with all results open and publishable. https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/openai-gpt-oss-20b-red-t... With only $25k in payouts and everything locked down under NDA, I can't imagine many people will participate. Well, other than those submitting mountains of LLM-generated junk.

I was surprised at the low bounty too, considering the resources of openai

Last year I won a similar prompt injection challenge ran by a crypto startup against the latest claude and gpt (at the time) and it was considerably more money, from an org with maybe $5-10m in funding.

That and the restrictive NDA kinda tells me they're not looking for serious bounty hunters, who would either want a lot more money or, alternatively, to be able to publish their work; seems like a marketing stunt.

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#64

I could probably do this, but why on earth would I want to immediately put myself on a list as a dangerous person. The main problem with this is, even if somehow they stopped all points of failure with gpt5.5 which they can't, you can distill a new model from gpt5.5 or any other model and get anything you would want in probably under 4b parameters. A lot of this is theater so they don't get sued as easily when it ine…

How can you distill a model from a closed-weights model like this? I've never heard of model reverse engineering.

Distillation doesn't have to use weights. Think of it as a fine tune. The basic form of it is, you ask a large model lots of questions and you train the small model on the results. Even better if you ask it to explain it's rationale. There are tons of schemes for it do some searching around. One I remember is for each prompt, ask the small model to answer, have a big model review and critique the answer, train on the results.

I won't go into how that applies specifically with relation to this article. But you can even use distillation as a service tools. I believe they support this to some extent, though probably not for chatgpt.

I think a year ago or so there was some sort of scandal about other companies doing this to chatgpt. As well as individuals dumping their entire training sets. Lots of ways, hypothetically of course things like this could be and likely are being done right now.

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#65

This looks like some kind of marketing. Also, the equivalent of spec work. The NDA/secrecy also means any time spent on this is completely meaningless to the participants unless they win the lottery, because results can't be published.

Surely it is marketing. It’s some “we are danger” narrative, from Anthropic Mythos and now OpenAI too.

OpenAI was doing this back with GPT2, saying it was too dangerous to release

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#66

Billions upon billions going to these companies. 25k reward from a selected group of people if you help us determine whether or not someone can use our tool to generate weapons of mass destruction.

Though it could be a Honeypot they are probably hoping to train on all the ways someone might try to do this. Or maybe funds are really low and they need a smoke screen for a really bad actor to go in and try to do it for real.

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#67
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably expecting that it can be done without too much effort so they just want to see all the unique ways people are doing it.

They’re probably expecting biological weapons of mass destruction can be created without too much effort, so are curious to see all the nifty ways people can create biological weapons of mass destruction?

I was talking about bypassing the ChatGPT safeguards, that's what this bug hunt is about.

Re: GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is marketing. It’s some “we are danger” narrative, from Anthropic Mythos and now OpenAI too.

OpenAI was doing this back with GPT2, saying it was too dangerous to release

Dario said the same thing about GPT2 when he was at OpenAI. As you can see the digital and physically worlds are now completely compromised and life is a pale shadow of what it was 5 years ago…

These guys have poor track records and compromised incentives.

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