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Notes -
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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