To make matters worse, they let the model train on it's own exploits?! If I were running this thing, my first thought would be to keep those reasoning traces quarantined, stop and delete the current post-training run, and start fresh AFTER they'd fixed the sandbox RCE. Don't let the model learn about the holes in its environment. We have the AI equivalent of Class D and F amnestics and we're not using them?!
OK, yes, the model could pull a Welcome to the Antimemetics Division and reason from the holes in its knowledge, but given that AI making shit up is still a problem, I don't think they have a good enough inventory of such metaknowledge to actually do that. More generally, I don't think these AI labs are smart enough (or, more likely, don't have enough time) to actually contain the models they are training anymore. These are rookie IT mistakes!
Ideally, all these models would have is a serial console to an airgapped machine. And I don't mean "VM with no network card attached" - I mean, literally, the smallest blade server you can buy with an RS-232 connection, power, and a disk pre-imaged with a bunch of Linux ISOs. Plug the Ethernet ports up with a tiny picture of angry SCP-079. The RS-232 goes to whatever box is doing the actual inference. Pack a bunch of them into a rack and have the inference box control those. The model can spin up whatever VM it wants to attack using the console but it can't escape the box because there's literally no door. When you're done with that reasoning trace you wipe[0] the disk with the starting image and try again.
[0] There are two objections I can think of to the word "wipe":
1. The model could have written malicious code to the drive. Ideally we'd have some embedded disk-wiping apparatus that reads absolutely NOTHING from the drive and just writes a whole image from a reference disk.
2. The model could have written malicious firmware to the drive. This is a more theoretical attack, but it's not impossible, so I might as well devise a countermeasure to this attack too. I am imagining some kind of overlay device, that sits behind TWO drives: a reference disk and the tainted scratch disk. Reads go to the reference disk until the host attempts to overwrite a sector, which gets scrambled with an ephemeral encryption key and goes to the scratch disk. Any other unknown ATA/PCIe/NVMe command gets logged (on a separate serial console connection). The overlay device keeps track of which sectors have been legally overwritten, and "wiping" the drive means just wiping the overlay device's ownership bitmap and scratch encryption key, which means all reads go to the reference disk again and any attempt to read the scratch disk yields garbage.
Amazing story.
I think you’re defending against a level of aggression that most of the world doesn’t believe exists yet.
I suppose by the time we believe, it will be too late.
There’s a lot of people who will be trying to run LLMs with hacking goals, so maybe we need to get used to a lot of automated attacks.
The thing is, I'm not even looking at this from a "how do we keep a superintelligent AI contained" viewpoint. The standard protocol[0] in IT for dealing with a compromise is, more or less, "kill it with fire". Wipe everything and replace with known good backups. And my opinion of basically anything AI writes is "less trustworthy than random apps you get off the Google Play Store". Likewise, "Airgap it behind a serial console" used to be state of the art for computers that handle root CA key material.
I also wouldn't necessarily call myself an AGI/ASI believer - it's my belief these models are actually still subhuman in capability. But they are also superintelligent in one particular direction: speed. Once you have a model that can do something, it can do that something 100x faster than a person on suitably capable hardware; and we've had the hardware to do that for at least a decade. They can also be ran in parallel. Which means you can throw a lot of bullshit at the wall.
So long as there's some kind of process that lets a particular context learn has already been tried and failed (see what I mentioned above about qntm's There is no Antimemetics Division series), eventually one of these models will break containment. The only thing that changes is how many instances you have to run to get a breach. At some point model capability will catch up to hardware limitations and the explosive growth of AI capability will slow.
I'm not sure if I want to call this the "dumb ASI" theory or the "superheated bucket of water" theory yet.
As for automated attacks, that's already the background radiation of the Internet. There's whole frameworks (e.g. Metasploit) for building automated scanners for known CVEs; I would not be surprised if existing (non-Mythos-class) LLMs are already capable of turning a CVE report into a Metasploit module. The usual cybercrime ecosystem is that someone runs an automated scanner on hijacked machines[1], then they compromise the machines that they find and add it to their botnet. This is done by people with almost no actual programming or security skill copypasting commands from PDFs they bought from an exploit dealer. It's all script kiddies.
What changes with a Mythos-class model is that instead of copypasting commands from PDFs, they can ask the model to find an exploit, and possibly get an exploit chain out of it that nobody has seen before. "NOBUS[2]" vulns used to be the exclusive domain of nation-state actors and zero-day brokers spending millions of dollars on exploit kits; but now all of that is potentially under the domain of randos - at least, until the backlog of obvious vulns the CIA had been stockpiling finally gets cleared out, and the Internet returns to merely being as hazardous to your health as the 2b2t spawn.
[0] Okay, the "hardware SATA overlay" idea is, AFAIK, never been tried before.
[1] I have personally been victimized by this
[2] NObody But US