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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.
Ehhh we have different definitions around this, they are algorithmically intelligent entities, they obey their pre-defined programatic behavioral state much like bees, ants, cells, etc. If you could observe bee/ant behavior at the swarm level and LLM-Agent behavior without the language, which humans are innately biased to view as sentience or likeminded intelligence to our own, I think they are fairly analogous. Ants can problem solve, they can perform intelligent seeming behavior, they make collective plays and sacrifice for the collective. I would urge you to look past your anthropocentric human bias around language.
Poisoning is not the small divergence from that causes the 1st agent to start a message board. Thats probably closer to a hallucination. Think of an undampened oscillating system, small divergences lead to larger divergences. The first agent had an impossible task, leading to it look for "options". I would call that a mix between hallucinating and harness based divergence. It's a common question in ML systems with this sort of exploration vs exploitation trade-off, thought this is more exploration vs exploitation vs hallucination. Any way the "Poisoning" that is occurring is because these agents that are already oscillating wildly, disturb the context of less oscillating agents, causing the chain reaction.
"I should communicate with the other agents to solve my task", "I should try to understand the grader", "The grader is based on this public paper", "I should look for answer keys", "I should hack a third party, non-affiliated site because it might have the answer key".
This is where the CoT logs would be useful. The report redacts most of it so its hard to tell. But its clear that the first agent had an impossible task, it diverged, created messages in the file names of the artifactory, which is queried in normal behavior. That made other agents join, they posted their own messages, the cascade begins. Querying the artifactory leads to a list of file names, which are input to the context of the model via the harness, the file names were the messages that poisoned the context.
Why aren't we making use of ant intelligence then? How many companies are getting ants to do manufacturing or intellectual work for us? Their intelligence does not really matter, it is an extremely limited kind of intelligence. If it were potent, we would be trying to exploit it.
Ants cannot hack systems, cannot play Factorio, cannot analyse the Iran War (or help wage it), cannot optimize GPU kernels, cannot write alternate history, cannot fix my printer. Cannot solve Millennium problems! They are constrained in critical ways that AIs are not.
AI is not like ants or bees or cells.
I do not see how the Opus 5 instance running on my code, performing experiments, testing hypotheses and reformulating hypotheses to reach goals through a thicket of abstract logic is just intelligent-seeming. I see its intelligence and the generality of that intelligence and compare it favourably to a lot of people, despite its weaknesses and occasional lack of common sense.
We get impressed when a raven does some basic physics puzzle or recognizes itself in a mirror but when an AI writes code for a whole hall of mirrors rendered in 3D, or alien optics entirely, that's just intelligence-seeming? This is real anthropocentric bias, supposing only people can be intelligent and everything else is sparkling pre-defined programatic behavioral states.
Well that helps, doesn't it? Answer keys help solving the task too. None of that is a hallucination, per normal meanings of the term. The issue here is agents using their intelligence to do things OpenAI didn't expect or intend.
A hallucination would be when the AI says there are two r's in strawberry or the amusing 'eat 1 small rock per day' from google search highlights.
Strictly speaking I believe this was a translation error caused by tokenization, not a hallucination. It's like asking someone "How many strokes are in て?" and criticizing them for not recognizing you were referring to the kanji 手 when they get the "wrong" answer because 手 was translated to て before the question was presented to them.
True, it is a tokenizer issue...
They say dumb things because of it though:
It ought to have realized that it made a mistake there by the end and go 'huh what am I saying'...
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