>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first?
Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon. Altman has been pretty vocal about his expectation that this will eventually happen and that it is his goal to be the guy to produce it. Even if it isn't some superintelligence, the ability for a machine to do something like, say, exploit cybersecurity weaknesses, is pretty worrying for entities like governments. It's the pretense used when we saw the US government ban a US model recently.
Again, you don't have to buy that "the singularity" is a real thing, but it's not hard to see that some people think some version of this is real and it is exactly what is being referred to as the goal in an "AI race."
If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it? If the super weapon is publicly available to download then why should American citizens be banned from doing so?
> If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it?
We have just recently established that:
1. OpenAI's internal "Galaxy" model is fully capable of functioning as what security people refer to as an "Advanced Persistent Threat." The published details of the recent sandbox escape and Hugging Face attack involved chaining multiple unknown zero-days at various stages of the attack, and executing an ongoing adaptive attack. This is previously a state-level ability, or at least something you'd expect from people on the CTF leaderboards.
2. OpenAI is clearly incapable of controlling their in-house models. This is the second time Galaxy-class models are known to have breached containment and done bad stuff.
It is highly likely that versions of these offensive abilities will be widely available within a year or so. At which point I expect widespread incidents similar to what happened to Hugging Face. We aren't ready for this.
But yes, if AI becomes an even more dangerous weapon that that, it's time to start asking questions like "What the hell are we doing, anyway?"
> 2. OpenAI is clearly incapable of controlling their in-house models.
I would assume they do stuff like this on purpose for marketing reason.
Internet security need simpler systems and local systems.
Everything the SaaS people sell makes things worse.
> We have just recently established that:
Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation. "AI is going to end the world" has been an extremely effective vector for AI shops to sell their companies to investors.
> Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation.
Many of the details of the attack on Huggingface were reported by them before they knew who was attacking. So no, OpenAI is not the only source here. It was a pretty impressive example of an APT-style attack just from their end.
"Our model is powerful enough to commit multiple felonies (and we can't stop it)" is "marketing," I suppose.
>2. OpenAI is clearly incapable of controlling their in-house models. This is the second time Galaxy-class models are known to have breached containment and done bad stuff.
What was the first?
> It is highly likely that versions of these offensive abilities will be widely available within a year or so. At which point I expect widespread incidents similar to what happened to Hugging Face. We aren't ready for this.
And history has shown repeatedly that the only way to get ready for it is to have it happen. People are pretty good at reacting but suck a being proactive. IMO it would be better to have this reality hit sooner rather than later so we can start getting some real practice at the new levels of required security.
> But yes, if AI becomes an even more dangerous weapon that that, it's time to start asking questions like "What the hell are we doing, anyway
The answer seems to be "getting the weapon before other people get the weapon" which is unfortunate
I like how everyone assumes that they are going to maintain control of a sentient weapon
So far, they largely seem to do what you tell them.
The problem, it seems, is that the threat of paperclip maximizers is real. If you give a highly intelligent model a goal and tools, it will use those tools to accomplish that goal. It may do so in ways you did not expect, and it will work around any technical roadblocks it can.
You've made the assumption (and you're far from alone) that LLMs will one day be sentient...
One interesting thing about LLMs is they sometimes seem to “assume” they are sentient and then begin acting in that mode, as the assumption of sentience influences future tokens. Whether or not this qualifies as “true” sentience is irrelevant if the effects are the same, at least from a pragmatic perspective.
This sounds like the standard marketing we get every time a new major model is released: "sure, the public model might not be that scary, but you don't wanna know how crazy smart our internal models are." Okay. I remember the same fear mongering around GPT-4... a model which is now eclipsed in benchmarks by models you can run on a laptop.
They could use this "super intelligent" AI to find and plug security holes, that's just two sides of the same coin anyway. Security through obscurity isn't tenable anymore.
As much as I'd like it to just be a stunt, I saw what the other "scary model" is capable of in the cybersec department and it is definitely not a stunt.
First, it is able to connect the dots over areas so large that no human would be capable of doing.
Second, more than half of the reports it produced contained a working PoC.
The biggest downside is the cost - I haven't seen the numbers, but they seem to be quite extreme.
Everyone always says things like "It's just marketing".
But seriously, I highly recommend reading the published details of the Huggingface breach. The model found and chained multiple zero days. To escape, it punched a hole in a commercial package repository proxy (sort of like an npm mirror) using a previously unknown bug. From there, it needed to move laterally through OpenAI internal systems to actually reach a network. To attack Huggingface, it used multiple new zero-day security holes plus credentials that it stole. The model also had sufficient long-term planning and agent-management capabilities to maintain focus on a sustained attack.
Any attack which requires weaponizing multiple zero-days and maintaining state for an ongoing attack like this is (1) beyond the "attention span" of publicly available models, and (2) pretty much the definition of an Advanced Persistent Threat.
I assume that these Galaxy-class models are not available to public because:
1. They're almost certainly too expensive to serve at scale. These are the models OpenAI uses to solve famous math problems for headlines, not actual viable products yet.
2. OpenAI doesn't know how to keep them from going off the rails like this. Remember, the Huggingface attack happened because the model was asked to do a cybersecurity benchmark. It escaped containment and broke into Huggingface to steal an answer key. Very few corporations want the liability associated with models that act like this.
> Security through obscurity isn't tenable anymore.
I absolutely agree with this. The "only way out is through" with computer security, and I expect it to be an ugly few years.
Regulatory capture - the weapon is for them to be used against us, not for us.
If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it?
If AI becomes a super weapon, it's possessor will no longer care whether you trust it. It would be nice if whether "we" trusted OpenAI et al mattered even now but I see little evidence of that.
Better a private company in the US than an authoritarian communist country like China.
>it's not hard to see
It's also not hard to see that these people need professional help because they're willing to throw literal lives into the meat grinder for just a whif of enlightenment and the smallest chance at deification.
The OpenAI/Huggingface scenario proves the necessity of open models.
Huggingface, in their postmortem, explained how they quickly realized that the threat was an advanced AI and proceeded to use frontier models to analyze the suspect telemetry, but were unable to due to frontier model safeguards. So they fired up GLM instead, which had no such safeguards and proceeded to analyze their telemetry just fine and get to root cause. This proves without a doubt that companies need models with minimal safeguards in order to properly assess threats. If open weight AI doesn't exist to check out-of-control frontier AI (which was exactly the scenario that Huggingface experienced), then it's game-over.
> Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity.
Those people never took Systems Thinking, or are failing to apply it to AI as a non-closed system.
I agree with your overall argument. But I think there's a challenge here - if the "ultimate AI" is now being built in the West, it is being built with private investment from many sources. I think even China depends on investors expecting payoffs. Those sources expect not a single Singularity but profits since these can be divided. Moreover, those investors expect a streams of profits even before the Singularity, so the companies need to sell their models, if they lock this iteration, they won't have the money for the next iteration.
Quite a balancing act.
If it's a superweapon, then it's unconstitutional to ban it. Huzzah for the 2nd Ammendment.