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I haven't read that closely into this but I don't understand why there needs to be collision between OpenAi and Huggingface. It seems very likely that the attack did happen but that's not really the crux of the matter, it's how and why it happened.
This is not something we can know and we have to rely on how trustworthy we think OpenAI are. Did they engineer this through their prompting or their harness? Did they intentionally use a braindead "sandbox" solution? Did they direct it at a target they thought would be vulnerable to their specific model and harness? Etc.
I'm not saying this is what happened, just that there is no need for collusion between the two companies. The one with almost all the information is the one with the incentive both engineer the situation and lie about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It's not like anyone else could realistically know either, it's unfortunate that the incentives point the way they do.
If I had a nickel for every occurrence of "This AI has proven itself too dangerous a product to release to the Internet! By the way, we're selling access to
itthe same thing with an extra three days of engineering work for safety by subscription starting next week." from the usual suspects here, I think I'd nearly have a whole extra dollar by this point.Even if I had major concerns about AI safety --- I don't think it's a totally unreasonable concern --- the same people who claim to be the most concerned about it keep acting like they're crying wolf. I think the export control drama over Mythos is almost funny, because nobody there seems to be acting earnestly.
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There wouldn't necessarily need to be collusion, but it'd be pretty gutsy to commit multiple felonies as a marketing gimmick. You'd need collusion with Hugging Face if you wanted to make sure your conspiracy's actions were non-felonies (if revealed) or forgiven (if not revealed), plus collusion among a lot of your own senior engineers if anything more complicated than prompting was used to perpetrate the attack.
It'd be a stupid marketing gimmick anyway. Despite being very pro-AI in principle, my workplace currently only allows use of an ancient (on AI timelines) version of Codex, for security reasons, and the lobbying from below to hurry up approvals of newer versions just got cut off at the knees. "When my agent's done I have to check for bad design decisions" is much more tolerable than "when my agent's done I have to check for crimes". I'd be happy if this eventually leads to a switch to Claude, but that'll be much more red tape than "finally bump a version number" would have been, and OpenAI definitely wouldn't be happy.
It's also a stupid conspiracy theory for more basic epistemological reasons. Reward hacking has been reported by other AI researchers over and over and over again. I get that it's scary to use induction here as AI gets more capable, but Occam says "the thing that keeps happening kept happening" is a better explanation than "we put in a ton of effort to make it stop happening but then also some secret dangerous effort to pretend it's still happening".
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