This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Well, the thing with the marketing arguments is that there's many ways to make those arguments, some more plausible than others.
Strong form: OpenAI intentionally induced their agents to compromise the internet for marketing purposes.
I agree that trying this would be very stupid and not particularly likely.
--
Semi-strong: OpenAI intentionally sandboxed their agents poorly to stochastically induce agent misbehaviour for marketing purposes.
This one I could see going either way. It does seem like there were some egregious oversights in the sandboxing setup, but whether these were intentional or real oversights is impossible to say.
--
Weak: OpenAI did not intend for misbehaviour to happen, but now that it has happened they're spinning it as hard as possible for marketing.
Personally, I think this one is pretty likely. I was very unimpressed by the METR report for instance, they basically just slopped together some agent review to hype up capabilities without actually auditing the root causes of why it all happened in the first place.
I, for one, have trouble believing that the same folks preaching the dangers of ASI unwittingly used just a proxy to poorly-sandbox for "take off all the guardrails" pen testing. At least a few corporate networks I've known have, pre-AI, built more layers of security than this. Accounts of "my work computer can't access the Internet" are something I've heard plenty of times.
If this is their normal model (maybe believable: move fast and break things), I'd also be concerned about the other direction: a nation-state actor would only need to pass through Artifactory (maybe a supply chain attack on hosted packages) to start egressing model weights, which is their entire trade secrets.
The methods of running a true air-gapped system are well-documented, and I'm pretty sure someone at OpenAI is already doing it for government contracting.
The big AI labs are mostly staffed by people straight out of academia, be they researchers or enthusiastic star undergrads. There is a lot of metis on locking down corporate systems that never had a chance to propagate into their operations, and the more general pattern of "SV startups fail to do something that is baseline common sense for more traditional companies" has been observed many times before.
I suppose on that front it's not surprising that the Hugging Face incident didn't occur at Meta or Google. But the hubris of self-declared experts here is ironic, at best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"People are that incompetent" is a much more realistic explanation than "people are secretly pretending to be incompetent as part of a genius Machiavellian plan to achieve their goals".
You're not wrong, but I usually find that incompetent people aren't particularly self-aware. Knowing that what you're doing is dangerous (they say so themselves!) and choosing to do it anyway (they did!) together IMHO go beyond incompetence and into questioning-motives territory. But I can't rule out that they are just spectacularly incompetent and should (be forced to?) step back from their goals for the sake of the rest of us.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem with the weak argument is that it is, well, weak. It demonstrates nothing, particularly given we can already assume that every corporate communication ever made is being spun to portray the corp in a more positive light.
Indeed, we actually know one of the methods that OpenAI used to try and spin the METR evaluation more positively: they heavily restricted the scope to prevent any of the details of the German wiki collusion coming to light. Which also raises the other critical weakness of the marketing argument, in that many of the recent safety scandals have come to light from third party sources. METR, the UK's AISI, and a couple of independent researchers for the collusion stuff. Now, given METR's links with the wider AI ecosystem, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that they could have been influenced to present things in a certain way and thus aren't fully independent, but it would be a much larger leap to suggest this of a UK gov organisation, and an impossible leap to suggest that of a couple of randos.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link