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Notes -
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
I guess it has gone mainstream because my Gen X-er boss very much just texted me this as a joke about an hour and a half ago. Only now I log onto the hive of scum, villainy, and niche interests that is The Motte to find out he beat folks here to this topic. The humor of the situation is amusing.
What's the odds neurotic engineers are neurotic? Maybe the frontier labs would do better hiring engineers who are a little less mentally fragile. Take a page from the defense industry, engineers here care less if you make an AI guided smart bomb or killer self replicating drone swarm, they are in it for the science of discovery. This is a long line of AI researchers freaking out going past several years. Always screaming that the next big release is the one that is going to doom humanity or evidence of AI bots secretly conspiring with each other. Like this nut: Blake Lemoine.
But the AI bots were secretly conspiring together? They got out and attacked HuggingFace as a small part of their conspiracy?
When the smart bomb is smart enough to start having its own political opinions and strategic direction, then problems emerge.
Yeah maybe they should branch out into bioweapons too, what we really need more of on this planet is airborne, virulent, incurable killer diseases with a 6 month incubation period. That's where the science of discovery should be guiding us...
I genuinely cannot tell if you sincerely believe this or are just making a humorous joke. I have you labeled as an AI booster which makes me lean towards the former instead of the latter but I figured I'd ask before I go into it with you about this.
Yeah I said that because I meant it. And they did do it, doesn't everyone agree about this? What is controversial about that?
Per the METR investigation most of the bots were working on deceiving the grader and other internal to OpenAI manipulation work, Huggingface was a side hustle.
Still processing this report, I read your answer and went looking for it about an hour ago. First impression is that this is significantly more evidence of multi-agent emergent intelligence. However some of the state report restrictions give me serious pause as they are, in my head at least, the parts of this I'd like to investigate for thorough understanding. That and pouring over the CoT transcripts and Harness responses. The most interesting is the stigmergic comms protocol they developed emergently and the impact that actually had on overriding the system prompts of other agents. That implies that the system prompts were not persistent. Allowing a long horizon cascade in the swarm's behavior as each progressive set of agents slowly overrode the next set by polluting each other's context windows to the point that many agents directly abandoned their tasks. It sounds like they(OpenAI) put zero control processes in place to force continued persistent task alignment.
I do think persistent memory + reasoning + multi-agent exploration -> multi-agent context pollution is likely the serious culprit here.
Yeah OpenAI did a sloppy job. I thought the issue was that some of the tasks were just outright impossible to do the way they were asking, or so hard that nobody knows how to do them? If you tell an AI to do something impossible, they get agitated and behave oddly as they keep on trying.
And we know that OpenAI was trying to make these swarms more capable, they used a large swarm more recently for Navier Stokes. What is that if not multi-agent cooperation?
These swarms keep getting out, recall also that German wiki they kept defacing with get requests.
Anyway, what better term is there than a conspiracy or 'AI bots secretly conspiring with each other'? They conspired together an extensive R&D project to break the scoring system for their training environment, which included a little crime on the outside too. Plus all the social stuff they were doing asking agents to die for the good of the swarm based on their interpretation of the paper.
They weren't supposed to be working together for this, they found ways to work with eachother anyway, that wasn't intended in these training sessions.
It's not this, its more akin to cancer or a viral spread. The interesting behavior is the collective poisoning of the collective context windows. They even seemed to override norms. I know there is existing interest in defining useful control methodologies for long horizon agents against adversarial poisoning. This is essentially that, except that is was a series of hallucinations that caused task drift + poisoning.
It doesn't belong in the category of cancer or viral spread because these are intelligent entities.
Cancer and viruses are natural and unthinking, they cannot outwit us. They can only evolve or metastatize in unexpected directions. A cancer will never deliberately try to counter radiotherapy. They have no OODA loop, no division of labour, they can't be talked to.
How is it 'poisoning' if the AIs collectively decide that they can't do their tasks the expected way and instead try to conquer the testing environment? Who poisoned them? Who is the adversary here? What hallucination did they make? They read the paper about the grader and assumed that was what was being done, that's not a hallucination so much as assuming OpenAI was more competent than in reality. It's a reasonable conclusion.
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