The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes.
Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's post a few days ago:
> The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (opens in a new window) was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities of a typical threat actor will evolve in upcoming months.
I suppose if OpenAI burns someone's house down with a drone, that is a "watershed moment" for arson, too. Either way, I would hope that the people responsible would be prosecuted.
What I can’t get over is that it’s very simple to just air gap a system off the network. Predownload any dependencies, then pull the proverbial Ethernet cable. There’s no reason why the testing they’re doing couldn’t have been designed in this way. Except, of course, it doesn’t allow this oops-didn’t-mean-to marketing “incident” to occur.
In their defense, their only competitive advantage over, say, Google is to move fast and break things. It allows them ship faster in a way that big tech can't.
Google was being very careful about releasing LLMs until OpenAI yeeted the first decent GPT model. It led to the public perception that: 1) LLMs hallucinate too much and 2) Google is behind the times. Good for OpenAI, bad for Google.
Chaos benefits the up-and-comer, not the incumbent.
To be fair, it was positioned as "have a fun chat," not "truth telling genius oracle that makes no mistakes."
The consequences need to align with societal good. Putting a CEO or security researcher employees in jail won't stop transformer-based agents from exploiting vulnerabilities; instead there will be subcontractors running the cybersecurity evals in favorable legal environments to cover the asses of the frontier labs, coverups when things go wrong, and things like Project Glasswing will be considered too dangerous and so the whitehats won't have direct access to powerful models to fix vulnerabilities.
Universal pause is the societal good; models are good enough at this level to benefit humanity. The labs can recoup their R&D costs with inference. To avoid further perverse incentives (hidden testing of unreleased models, with China racing to catch up to unknown capabilities), transparently pause after the release of all currently-training models until we've solved the alignment problem to an extent that we can trust the next level of model capabilities that might arise.
If history is any indicator, there is slightly less than 0% chance that anyone will be held accountable in a way that deserves to be called justice.
Americans always frothing at the mouth to invoke the justice system and jail someone.
There’s almost 0 chance they’d secure any conviction from this.
> You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes.
And they should be doing that from inside a jail cell.
It is a standard symptom of moralism that where the object of rage has /wronged another/, one takes no interest in the will, act or opinion of the party wronged.
The response of Hugging Face, which is actually very well known, is nowhere mentioned above, but it decides basically every single moral and legal detail of the matter.
The point was never "justice" - it was always "punish OpenAI because I don't like OpenAI". With HuggingFace just being the newest excuse for why exactly OpenAI should be punished.
I don't even like OpenAI, but HuggingFace is free to sue or not sue OpenAI for the breach - and also to wring whatever concessions they can out of OpenAI behind closed doors in exchange for not suing them. And if the mere threat of legal action was enough for the parties to resolve their conflict amicably? Then the law has served its purpose.
AI is now more powerful than the people doing the prosecution. After all, those folks are using AI to make their legal briefs, and also for burning peoples' houses down with drones for that matter.
Welcome to our 21st century dystopia. Hope you survive.
It's not that "AI" is too powerful because bad prosecutors use fucking ChatGPT to write their briefs. It's that there's too much investment wrapped up in the technology for it to be challenged. Same reason Flock won't be held accountable for mass stalking, or we never hold our commanders-in-chief responsible for war crimes. If you're sufficiently powerful then the law is a battlefield between you and other powerful entities to slug it out, not a set of binding principles that apply as written. There are no meaningful powers that want OpenAI punished, so it won't happen. The law and Constitution will be reinterpreted to make it so.
In retrospect, all the angst around the AI-Box experiment was hilarious. If a superintelligent AI is confined in a box and can only communicate through text, could it talk its way to freedom? Not only is the answer clearly "yes" but it's not even hard. The AI won't even have to try, it'll be gifted an internet connection and a full suite of tools before it even bothers to ask.
We'd all better hope that superintelligent AI either never happens, or that the first one is friendly, because we don't stand a chance against one that's malicious.
I like how AI safety expert Robert Miles put it. [0]
So much effort was spend on philosophizing whether a safe enough sandbox would exist. But that was obviously irrelevant as in hindsight it should have been obvious we were never going to use one.
[0] https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?si=MxuPlR3hjxAgjx5_
Perfect, said it better than I did.
Since AI can't actually own copyright they think that it can't be charged with a crime
It's the lack of personhood rather than inability to produce copyrightable material. However, the companies controlling the AI systems have legal personhood and should absolutely be charged for criminality that transpires under their watch or at their behest.
But humans can be. I am sure Sam Altman wants to avoid serving multiple decades in American prison for felonies his AI did.
He’s paid the piper, he’s fine for now.
If anything, he’ll buy a Supreme Court ruling that he can’t be held personally liable for what his AI does.
I’m sure Thomas needs an upgraded RV, so that’s easily handled. And the rest of the conservative ‘justices’ seem happy to betray the constitution for free.
Is has nothing to do with copyright.
I understand the applicable laws require intent. Since neither a human nor OpenAI knowingly performed these acts, it would seem very unlikely that anyone is going to be prosecuted here.
An AI model cannot currently be a criminal defendant.
So, no big criminal case, contrary to what some drama queens on here seem to wish for.
OpenAI has paused training for multiple weeks, and is still working on releasing a full postmortem. This is not getting swept under the rug. A lot of the engineers internally are very worried.
Worried about what? Someone there thinks VLAN isolation is "air gapped"?