These companies are building software. That doesn't work very well. The output it produces does make sense at times, but there are times when it doesn't. And instead of fixing that, or admitting it can't fixed, they started bolting actuators to them, executing actions online (for now) based on the output of their buggy software.
And when this results in actuators executing some bad actions they scream in horror "AI went rogue! It escaped the containment!!! It's going to kill us all!!!"
Go fix your software before you let it do stuff online or IRL. It's not "Terminator", it's just bad QC.
But the thing is, they are going to keep bolting more and more actuators on, and training more and more powerful agents, and we (society, especially the tech industry) are going to keep using them, because they are extremely useful. And I don't see why you're so confident that frontier agents can't get powerful enough to do serious, real, lasting damage to the world; as far as I can tell, AI models have been improving at an accelerating rate, and there is no sign that that is slowing down or will slow down in the near future.
You're missing the point here.
If we take the major LLM companies' claims at face value, they're knowingly building WMDs that have a high probably of wiping out the entire human race. [0] Manufacturers that are designing, building, and selling that sort of thing need to have a dreadfully serious culture of safety.
When manufacturers run live tests of their extremely dangerous -again, the claim of danger is their claim- tools with the tools' safeties removed, one expects that those tests will be run on a carefully-controlled range cleared of all bystanders. One also expects that the results of those tests will be scrutinized and everything that got damaged that they didn't intend to be damaged will be noticed and noted very quickly after the conclusion of the test.
In actuality, these manufacturers connected said tools to the Internet and did not discover the unintended damage caused by those tools until weeks to months after the tests. In some (most?) cases, they had to be notified of the damage by the damaged party! This means that their safety culture is entirely inadequate for the dangerous task they've deliberately chosen to undertake.
[0] A 10% chance of causing the destruction of the entire human race is -given the stakes- _enormous_.
It seems that we’re mostly in agreement? I agree that OpenAI has been terribly irresponsible, and that this attack being an accident makes things worse. I think we need strong action now to stop the frontier companies from developing dangerous, powerful AI agents that they don’t know how to control.