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The only substantiative comment to address the claim in the title, and it is from a nebulous "Tech industry insider". The other comments are by guys that run various "AI" Startups.
I don't buy a lot of the hype either but trying to present their claim as some revelation or news should have something to add.
The entire article is "Some tech people say the agents just had a bad sandbox and proper controls would've prevented this. Politicians are introducing bills to 'ban AI research '."
There saved you a click or a commanding your AI agent summarizing it.
I always turn to the NY Post for nuanced tech reporting.
Though in general I agree, i think in HN world this seems more or less old news/obvious, while mainstream still doesn’t know (or maybe care to understand) thats what likely is going on.
I had a friend reach out in a slight panic after the Anthropic employee publically left, asking sole quite apocalyptic questions around AI given the sandbox “break out” and the Anthropic affiliated employee(s) saying theres something like > 10% chance AI kills all humans in the next decade.
This fear mongering needs to be exposed, so we can (hopefully) have more measured discussions around next steps. Stop all progress for regulatory capture? I’d rather not. Hold companies who commit crimes like hacking huggingface or Ruby dependencies liable (not to mention all the copyright issues)? Seems more measured to me. But i digress.
Hard agree on that one.
I've always taken the example that at any given moment openai and anthropic have models that are "far better and exceed any expectations", yet their coding tools suck ass and are outperformed by random people on the internet.
HN had a good thread discussing the original scoop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704132
This kinda have a point, if Chinese companies can distill US models and offer it at a competitive price, what prevents another US startup doing the same? OpenAI and Anthropic can actually influence the regulations to be a barrier for entry.
Also regarding all the hacks, I always wonder why are they so boring, like agents posting to some wiki or using a bug in documentation to execute some code in a sandbox remote server, like if AI is so dangerous, how come they haven’t hacked into banks and stolen money or hacked into North Korean nuclear program and shut it down or any other major disruptive incident.
I probably have an unpopular viewpoint. I think the hacks really showed that the alignment is kind of mostly working.
There is still a lot of work to do and the agents did some damage, but the blast radius was pretty small and they could have done much more damage if alignment didn't hold up as well.
Edit: Though I do want to be clear it does also show how a maligned model probably can do some serious damage.
... like they oversell everything about their LLMs. To the tunes of hundreds of Billions of USD.
The value of AI is built on top of the idea that it can erase the cost of labor in a wide range of professions.
They're all racing for this, hoping to make money first, because once that erasure really sets in, there is no-one out there to buy products anymore, which means all those companies who replaced human labor by AI don't have anybody to sell their products to anymore.
And once that happens who is going to be needing all of these tokens?
This is reporting an opinion held by outside observers as if it is a leaked internal secret.
It's a perfectly valid opinion but not any kind of secret.
Maybe they were hoping for some of that sweet sweet gov money. Maybe a bailout, who knows?