Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.
Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"
The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA...
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Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.
"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.
confidently diagnosing an essay as dogma while admitting you didn't even read the thesis is peak internet.
His mentioning of python being a basic/easy to master language isn't manipulation, he's demystifying. It strips the magical hyperbolic framing that has been attributed to AI (and to which those with most to gain from it financially very much wish to feed into!)
His point about being wrapped in python isn't a failed attempt to give a lecture on transformer architecture, its to explain that the automation loop is controlled by basic inputs from a user controlled and relatively simple software stack, not some sentient machine with a mind of its own. Its not emergent behavior, it's optimizing execution patterns embedded in the data it was trained on.
For my part, I'm just awed how many comments I come across that are just half-assed lazy people who evidently can barely read, but think they're experts. Calling Doctorow's work 'slop' or quitting reading while feeling so confident proves his point: people would rather buy into hype than actually understand how the tech works.
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