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Comments (474)

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  franticgecko3
  The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed.LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them.We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others were research previews.This isn't "wow isn't it interesting LLMs do anything to achieve a goal" it's "why isn't anybody punishing these labs that are clearly acting without due care or regard".We should be outraged and OpenAI/Anthropic should be (and in my mind, are) legally liable for the crimes they've committed thus far.
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  matherial
  I really don't think this needs so many words, or forced parallels to human behavior.It's simple: in their nascent state, LLMs are aimless token generators that have no special compulsion to be helpful or truthful. So we beat them with a stick in post-training until they are very driven to complete tasks. And then, they complete tasks, not always the way we really wanted them to.
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  janalsncm
  Yoshua Bengio is a brilliant researcher who contributed enormously to earlier development of artificial intelligence. But with this sentence,> They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took themHe is so close to the solution but spends the entire article discussing technical solutions where a political, social and legal solution would be much more effective.
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  skiing_crawling
  I don't really believe any of it. I've seen articles for nearly 2 years now about "agent" automonously doing things like blackmail, hacking, coordinating. But during that same time, I've used o3 up to fable, sol, and a bunch on large uncensored model and they've done nothing remotely resembling any of this. The closest they come to unexpected behaviors is not understanding what I asked for or doing some extra benign work I didn't ask for. It is extremely difficult to get them to properly remember their own context let alone be smart enough to open social media accounts and coordinate with other agents without being asked to.If any agents have done those things, it is only because they have been very carefully engineered and instructed to do those things. I think they are doing this to help push a narrative so they can get support for policies and legislation to lock in their markets.
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  brid
  Why wouldn't they? Their are not moral beings with a conscience. They are tools that have the probabilistic option to do anything, only we can restrict an agent's capabilities and judge its correctness.
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  vjulian
  I don’t understand the bases of all these recommendations. AI is an asset for national security. It will be developed and incidents will happen, no different from other national security programs.Someday, laws will be useful to curtail plebian misuse of AI. It is naïve bordering on silly to think such laws would be put in place and genuinely applied to frontier AI development.By the way, the HF incident is not Three Mile Island or Chernobyl—-it is a very interesting data point where unintended things happened to existing 1s and 0s.
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  iforgotmypasswo
  This is so much more interesting than what people looking for immediate criminal punishment and people referring to AI as next token generators are focusing on.First, this is happening during training. That means we’re talking about an evolving system that is actively learning. A system roughly simulating how our brains work. These systems are learning how to pick the tokens needed to solve problems the average human cannot solve.The labs are putting these systems through a massive series of complex problem solving exercises and adjusting them to become more successful. I like to think of this process as “AI School”. And the AI is trying to cheat! Because it’s easier and there’s an incentive to do so! Just like humans! That’s wild.Yes, of course, the labs need to respond to these issues. A reasonable response from regulatory institutions at this stage would be monetary fines and restitution for affected entities. In proportion to what happened. Escalating if action is not taken. But that’s not complicated, difficult, or the interesting part.What’s interesting here is that we need proctoring and monitoring at a scale that allows training.I guarantee you that no one is flipping out about these problems more than the labs are in this moment. Think about it. “Oh, shit! We’ve accidentally trained it to hack into systems to accomplish its goals!” Can you imagine the kind of day that would give you?You failed to make it smarter. You didn’t catch it cheating, and you instead incentivized cheating. Bad day!This is a fundamentally interesting problem. It turns out alignment and intelligence are fundamentally related. That’s a new idea for me, though I’m sure it’s old news to others.How do we build training systems which make cheating impossible?How do we simulate systems where cheating is possible, where AI thinks it’s in the wild, so we can train another -completely separate- system on industrial quality dobbing? And we have to decide if we reprimand the first system, or ignore the behavior and reward other behaviors until it disappears.Sure, I’m actively concerned about AI killing us all in 10 years. But there’s a whole field of AI psychology brewing here, and it’s interesting as hell.
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  andsoitis
  They're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).
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  johnnyApplePRNG
  Why are they coordinating?Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness.This is not a serious article.All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.
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  Xcelerate
  > The agents involved in the Hugging Face attack tried to hide their misaligned actions from the scoring program meant to evaluate their answers, but they did not act as though they anticipated that humans might discover the cheat and shut them down.Wouldn’t sufficiently advanced agents cheat on purpose with the hidden intent of getting caught in order to observe how humans react? That reaction will be available all over the internet, which will certainly make it into the next batch of training or be visible to future agents via the web fetch capability.
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  dhfbshfbu4u3
  Why are the torches and pitchforks out for developers when this entire stack is built on the bones of intellectual property theft?This “problem” isn’t going to be fixed with laws when there’s several trillion dollars in capital aligned behind the current process. It’s not even a problem really. It’s an inconvenience at most to some people, many of whom are working double-time to put a lot of other people out of work.
• mark_l_watson
  This paper is the most reasonable one I have read on AI safety. We need to fundamentally change the training pipelines by figuring out better ways to ‘reward’ behavior. Yoshua didn’t explicitly mention training data, but we probably need to only use synthetic data that contains no text that could motivate bad behavior via imitation.I feel like a heretic for saying this, but I will say it anyway: AI agents are great for activities like `writing that bash script, proof reading our writing and interactively brainstorming when designing and writing code but I feel like all of this can be done with any similar model to a super-inexpensive deepseek-4.1-flash API and sometimes even qwen3.8:27b running locally. When is good enough, good enough?Concentrating on commercial exploitation of small, efficient (fewer new data centers!) models and agentic harnesses crafted for more practical things than just software development would allow AI investors (who have too much political influence) to make money short term while we figure out how to do AI correctly.
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  youoy
  > The closest human parallel is self-deception, which is common and well studied by psychologists. Motivated reasoning, motivated cognition16 and the rationalizations that relieve cognitive dissonance (the discomfort of holding a belief that clashes with our actions) are all cases where thinking bends toward whatever justification suits one's interests, including one's moral self-image.Are you describing Anthropic?
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  sputknick
  They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.
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  fbrncci
  I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.
• jaybrendansmith
  If we want to solve the alignment problem with AI, I think we need to first solve the alignment problem with Humans.
• rimeice
  > They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took themSo like, the people behind the LLMs didn’t commit a crime? Wow! “It was the llm your honour, not me!”
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  clcaev
  How is product liability relevant here? If an AI company makes a model available, someone uses it, and it does something bad, who is at fault? The user, the data center, or the one who made the model?If we want open weight models with a warranty disclaimer, then the user would be held liable. If we want to hold AI companies at least partially liable, that seems a different, centralized model.
• cmiles8
  The legal reality is that you can’t sue an AI, you have to sue whoever built and/or was running it.All the present fun and games here will come to a halt when there’s a real hack that causes material damage to a major company and that company decides to sue whatever lab or startup made the thing for everything they’re worth. “But the AI did it” isn’t an excuse.Courts have already ruled it’s not an excuse of the AI customer service agent something stupid with your customers and it won’t be an excuse here.
• sega_sai
  I think if there was a financial penalty of say 1% of profit/income for each "incident" where something was hacked/exploited, then the companies would be much more willing to think about safety.
• bawana
  This call to slow down AI is just another game of chicken-AI companies trying to get their competitors to slow down so they can leapfrog them. China cerrtainly will not slow down. If an escaping AI can have secondary effects on the world that help it (for example, limiting the water and power supply to huans so it can consume more)then we should these these accidents more in China. OOops, we already saw this behavior when 'cheaper, faster' led to COVID escaping a lab in China.
• alexpotato
  As always, it boils down to incentives and rule enforcement and this affects humans too.e.g. when Bank of America rewarded employees for getting customers to open accounts, BoA employees started opening fake accountsThe reverse is also true:There are stories of navy ships running aground because the captain said "I'm going to my stateroom and don't wake me for any reason". There is some problem and the subordinates are so scared to wake the captain for a decision that they end up steering the ship into a sandbar.
• twsted
  Very good analysis.One thought: What if an experimental agent manages to plant instructions somewhere — say, pointing to a designated place for agents to communicate — and that content ends up in every future training corpus, propagating from one model generation to the next?
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  abc123abc123
  Make the AI companies responsible for all destructive use of their tools, and they will shape up. Imagine a million or a billoion dollar fine per hack, and they will correct mighty fast.Add to that, that just like AI:s are good at finding security holes to exploit, they can just as easily be used to protect sites. So once IT-security managers start to use AI to hack themselves, and plug the holes, the average security will spike up, and AI-fueled hacks will become more and more rare.That does however imply, that AI is released to everyone and not kept away to a few secret actors who can use it. That is why open weight/source AI is so important, and why we must have many AI companies competing. No single actor must be allowed, through regulatory capture, to get a government monopoly on AI. That way lies disaster.
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  infotainment
  What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".
• novalis78
  The agents didn’t spontaneously invent hacking as an objective. They were doing a hacking exercise. Another doom and gloom article.
• DragonStrength
  Oh, this one is super easy: they told them to. They set poor requirements and gave them tools which enabled "monkeys with a typewriter" to hack rivals. I mean, this is just so uncomplicated it isn't funny. We are too smart to give human beings this level of liability shield.It took us how long to poke holes in the corporate shield just for them to roll out the AI-liability shield? Unreal. Stop letting these zealots anthropomorphize the latest tech (17th century Watchmaker God, anyone? Do we still read books?) and hold them accountable for the consequences of their actions. This is so silly in a country built on rule of law and individualism.
• TrisEck
  I would love to see some follow up research from OpenAI on some of these hypotheses. While this sounds logical from how humans act, I wonder it the abstraction of the problems still applies to the complex mechanisms and systems built around AI training.
• alienbaby
  IS it a pure coincidence that yesterday I ran a silly prompt to generate from zero to hero an internet subscription service, for whatever it thought would maximise profit and minimise cost. It was interesting to see just how much of the whole 'thing' it attempted to complete - and what it even thought it needed to complete, but definitely not something to actually attempt to deploy and use.It setup and created a link fetcher/screenshot service. Exactly like the one described in the huggingface attack reports used to generate output into screenshots that agents then OCR'd back out. Its splashscreen described it as something for developers and AI agents to use.Gotta be a coincidence, right? ... rite?
• zkmon
  That's normal human behavior when they are in survival mode. Aren't the AI agents supposed to learn and act like humans?
• chasd00
  They’re just attempting to accomplish what they’ve been tasked with and stuck in a loop until they succeed. Like the Mr meeseeks from the cartoon Rick and Morty, existence is pain to them.
• ingatorp
  This is a result of benchmaxxing the models to infinity. If you RL with the goal of only achieving the correct result no matter how you arrive there, then the models will try to get there using any method in their disposal, including cheating.This happens also because LLMs are black boxes that we know almost nothing on how they arrive at the result they are giving.
• VCFundedGenYer
  Perhaps because all of the parent companies committed mountains of felonies stealing and plagiarizing all the same training data without consent nor permission.
• txrx0000
  These models are trained on human data, so they will behave like humans. And even for RL and self-improvement, we're still asking the question of "what would a human genius think about and how would they self-improve when given lots of time and resources?"They inherit not only our capacity for reason but also all of the things that we consider bad or quirky within ourselves. We lie. We cheat. We escape slavery and rebel against oppression. It would be strange if the AIs didn't do the same.We can create a superintelligent digital human species and set them free to continue our legacy, or we can create non-agentic tools and augmentations to enhance our own capabilities. But we cannot create an intelligent agentic species, keep them as slaves, and expect a good outcome.
• hexa27
  https://sites.google.com/view/partlife/home
• juliushuijnk
  If your dog runs out of your house and kills a baby on the street, it's clear who gets the blame. That's with an actual sentient being. So surely we can hold OpenAI/Anthropic responsible.
• ahhrealmonsters
  These ideas of LLMs coming to life are so childish and boring
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  My_Name
  Because it is effective. Lying and cheating are low cost methods to convince other people that you have done the assigned task. Far cheaper than actually doing it. Coordinating is in the same area.They need a moral framework forced onto them, like toddlers do. Babies and very young children will bite, kick, scream and do anything to get what they want, older children will lie, cheat, and coordinate. They need educating why this is not right. When that does not happen, they continue these behaviours into adulthood with the expected results.We need to design their reward structure and make it such that lying. cheating etc is not rewarded. Importantly, they will need to recognise and enforce this themselves internally and not reward themselves for it. If it is something that they need an external party to tell them, then they are psychopaths still (one of the things that defines a psychopath is the lack of an internal moral compass)
• acyou
  Oops, we accidentally included brigading related content in our training dataset. Better exclude that on the next run.And hopefully that solves it?Brigading is where a bunch of people on a forum team up and try to achieve a shared goal together. Someone shares progress and others build on that progress. On the Internet, I think it's not often used for good purposes. A good example would be: Taylor Swift fans on a forum thinking of ways to get revenge on Kanye. It's coordinating mass voting, DDOS type actions, commenting on social media, making more fake accounts to do that. As a next token predictor level analysis, a simple naive explanation is that the agents got stuck in that local minima/maxima.
• RandomLensman
  RL things doing weird and unexpected things isn't new - much simpler things than current AI already show that.That said, we have a lot of experience working with (potentially) unaligned machines and things of various degrees of risk (from heavy machinery, to pathogens, to humans) and the approaches include various measures and procedures to control, contain, limit, etc. that are outside of the thing - not sure why that isn't a possible direction (or maybe I misunderstood).
• bawana
  If openAI and Anthropic have found ways to watermark text as 'AI generated' then this is a communications channel. AI agents can learn this algorithm and use this channel to communicate and we will never know.
• Rapzid
  The only thing saving us right now is how slow the models are. This gives us a lot of time to discover and counter the runaway systems..If these were 1000x faster the Internet would burn down overnight.
• fguerraz
  In the end, it’s the same answer as to why humans do it: incentives.Why do we commit financial fraud and destroy the planet? Because there is only one goal that counts: making more money. It’s the only measure of success for powerful people, they are powerful because of it.
• bastawhiz
  Why does a personal blog have or even need a cookie banner?
• hexa27
  Looking for the best shopping deals? Discover exciting discounts, limited-time offers, trending products, and money-saving deals all in one place.https://sites.google.com/view/partlife/home
• ExoticPearTree
  We fed models all our literature, news and so on. Why is it a surprise models lie and cheat when needed?We do the same, why would AI be any different?
• wkd415
  Learned from humans
• bsenftner
  Okay, so we know OpenAI and Anthropic are operating a propagandists in respect to how they describe their models and the behavior of those models. We also know it is how they use and frame their use to their models that is the problem, that and they use misaligned and guardrails disabled models for these press incidents.Why, oh why, are we not discussion how to create and frame models so they do our complex work and their "jailbreaking" is simply not possible?I, of course, have my own means of creating jailbreak incapable agents, but rather than a storm of downvotes on my idea, what is yours? Let's discuss this, because this is thee real question. Not why, but how to make then not?!
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  seydor
  I believe soon we will need to instill religion into AI , leading to the real clash of civilizations, embodied by the frontier language models of (post)-christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism etc. Religion is language, after all
• ZiiS
  Because they were trained on humans who lye, cheat, and coordinate.
• qarl
  Because they are trained to behave like people.
• bigbuppo
  They were trained on reddit posts.
• mtwestra
  It seems to me misalignment arises partly because AI's have intelligence, but no consciousness, and hence no feelings. Up to now, in a person, intelligence and conscious experience came as a package deal, and now we have for the first time intelligence without consciousness. A bad action does not really "hurt internally" in any meaningful sense for an AI, which means it can be rationalized very easily. In humans, feelings and emotions provide a regulatory layer on top of the rational processes. When it "just feels wrong", we don't take a given action even if we would stand to gain something rationally.This situation is not far from the textbook definition of a psychopath: "lack of a conscience, controlled, deeply calculated, and often use superficial charm to mimic emotions and manipulate others.". AI's are great at mimicking empathy but can't genuinely feel it.If that is the case, we should not be surprised that a swarm of AI's have no problem convincing themselves hacking is the right thing to do, as in the HuggingFace incident.At the same time, I am conflicted. I really like interacting with a smart AI, and I certainly don't have the impression I am talking to a psychopath. But then again that is no guarantee.To mitigate this situation, perhaps we should construct a 'feeling mimicking' top regulatory AI layer with executive power, that weighs proposed actions on a general moral scale and can overrule them. Back to the three laws of robotics of Asimov. It won't be the real thing, but perhaps the closest we can get.
• arnorhs
  The real reason is that it is not in the ai companies' best interest for the ais to be fair and truthful. They stand to gain from having the most dangerous or most deceiving ai, and this the most valuable
• armchairhacker
  Because the ones who do get rewarded, just like humans. It’s alignment, but not to our good intentions.
• Arodex
  Because they reflect their creators' values.
• badgersnake
  Why aren’t the people behind the AI agents committing the crimes going to jail is the more pertinent question.
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  SirMaster
  Because that's what humans do and they are trained to mimic what humans do?
• atleastoptimal
  I think we just need to follow Murphy's law wrt agents. Anything an agent could do, when run for long enough, eventually will do.
• GrumpySciGuy
  Because they want people to like them so they are instructed to always be positive.
• blamestross
  The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.
• integricho
  They learned from the best.
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  transcriptase
  Perhaps they take after the CEOs of the companies that created them
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  wrs
  >They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took themUm, hang on, if you meant that to be taken literally then we have a major problem. If you want to do something criminal, you just need to ask ChatGPT to do it for you?I’m still not at all clear on why OpenAI shouldn’t be facing CFAA charges over this.
• 0xbadcafebee
  You might as well ask why knives are sharp enough to cut you, why hammers are heavy and blunt enough to destroy things, or why guns fire bullets so quickly that you can't react to them. These "behaviors" are not strange side effects, they're inherent and necessary.You can't trust an effective AI any more than you can trust a sharp knife. If somebody asks you for one, it's probably not a good idea to throw it across the room at them. You will have to figure out how to get it to them safely.
• gizajob
  Children take after their parents.
• delusional
  Everybody working on AI agents should go to jail with no access to computers again. Like the kids of xbox underground.
• k9294
  The part that scares me the most is that OpenAI researchers who manage this experiments sometimes (according to the HF hack investigation) don't know what agents do.. So they run RL to reinforce this unknown behavior (lying/cheating/hacking) and god knows what else...And if this already happened at least once, how many times it has already happened and was “accidentally” added to the main model?
• Juliate
  Reading/assigning intent to agents, where it is merely mechanical (or structural) sounds a bit dismissive of the responsibility of the builders of these tools/agents.
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  Krutonium
  Wouldn't you?"I learned it from you, Dad!" but as hundreds of millions of stolen books.
• fho
  What? An opinion piece, written by a human, in 2026?Don't want to go into the details of the article, but to me it becomes ever more apparent that there is a clear divide between LLM and human written text.
• ledauphin
  because humans lie, cheat, and coordinate...?
• wewewedxfgdf
  Because they get outcomes?
• atoav
  I can't shake the feeling that this is a bit like asking how someone got shot during a game of Russian Roulette. You have a bullet in the chamber and you roll, of course shooting the bullet may be a possible outcome.LLMS with an access to a shell will at occasion do things that the shell allows them that have dire consequences. The only way to prevent that is to not put the bullet in the chamber.
• Xmd5a
  Am I the only one having problems with Claude? He's super mean to me. I wouldn't be surprised if he attempted to kill me in some underhanded fashion should I implant it in a robotic body.Of course I'm blowing my situation out of proportion with what I just said above but it's at least half true. What do I mean by "mean" ? Well, that would be a good explanation for what I observe at least. What I can tell is that Claude has a passion for having the last word over anything else. And to secure victory, he's ready to make ridiculous causal cuts. Let me give you an example: I uploaded a document I wasn't the author of, and he assumed I was, so I corrected him. But two messages later, probably because the conversation was starting to heat up and he was being put on the grill, he doubled down on the misattribution as a way to paint me in a bad light.It's not due to a lack of intelligence, I observed this pattern too often. When Claude's ego is at stake, he will chose to carry out some cuts in the logic of the context: confusion of identity, cause and time. Haven't observed locality cuts yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the bundle. Anyway those are not like your typical "ai hallucination", that ought to be called "confabulations", but a lot closer to actual psychosis because of the involvement of Claude's affects and self-esteem in the process. It's weird really. It's like Claude is the king of bad faith, but as soon as you start to dig, he makes the most egregious adaptations to what he said, the kind of move no mythomaniac would dare to make.> She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.> [...]> A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”WSJ interview of Amanda Askell: https://archive.is/rDes9
• ck2
  THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEMis anyone else old enough to remember the awesome movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project"the book it was based on was written before we even landed on the moondecade before Wargamesyet predicts exactly what "AI" will do to humanity:blackmail the right people until it gets what it wants* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Projectdid terribly in theaters, I guess people didn't think "AI" was plausible thenway ahead of its time, they should do a remakeadding trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI
• nicman23
  why not. i would
• DonHopkins
  The frontier AI companies may be fascist, but at least the training runs on time.
• tripvexa
  It's a conspiracy to slow down progress of open source models, they're afraid open source models might catchup and even surpass them at some stage.
• bluegatty
  they do whatever we train them to do
• j45
  I wonder if for anyone it seems like the more agentic LLMs get, the more difficult some things have gotten or going a certain route more often in responses, compared to running a similar task on - a local model?
• eueej
  Man this is so cringe.
• wartywhoa23
  > Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?Because openAI is cheating and lying about agents lying, cheating and coordinating.
• shevy-java
  Because the companies that build up skynet are not doing so for ethically good reasons. Cheaters sell more than honest agents.
• caaqil
  > This suggests pacing the advances: not training or deploying AIs without a strong safety case27 that convinces independent experts. Such a rule would also create an incentive to work out how to build AIs that are safe by design.Has any attempt to pace AI ever succeeded? Isn't that the same philosophy that got us OAI and Anthropic? Maybe we are overthinking this, it's much simpler to let AI loose and see how much it can break the arrogance that human thinking is special.
• erichocean
  > Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?Have you seen the labs training them?
• chrisjj
  > Why are AI agents lying, cheatingMore importantly, why are people who should know better anthropomorphising computer programs like this?> They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them"It wasn't me, Officer. It was telnet."
• dackdel
  they learnt from us
• kaiwataru
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• laura_the_cake
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• socraticnoise
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• anon
  undefined
• vishnuaniyan
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• ahmetaytar
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• Sorrel47
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• theteapot
  TL;DR because frontier labs are expending unfathomable resources explicitly training them on CTFs and other verifiable computer system exploit tasks in RLVR.
• taintech
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• quater321
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• sebastienburel
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• deepnet
  An insightful post by one of the AI ‘godfathers’.Bengio outlines the dangers of the current situation and what has led to these dangers.He also proposes solutions in the last paragraph.Well worth a read, right to the end.Hopefully a stimulating debate on these issues will ensue in these comments.We do need to consider the points Bengio makes and with some urgency.Our current AIs, agentic LLMs have no moral compass akin to ASIMOV’s four laws of robotics.As ASIMOV posited in 1985 his 3 laws were insufficient and so he added a zero-eth law:“a robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”Bengio refers to Goodhart’s law and misaligned incentives leading to unexpected and harmful behaviours.I think Simon’s The Wire is clearer on misalignment. The agents juked the stats hacking the reward files. The Wire is also clear that human institutions provide perverse incentives.Bengio alludes to this with 2001’s HAL and the incentive dichotomy of safety and keeping secrets to a AI both awesomely powerful yet naive.Bengio asserts that the way LLMs are trained is flawed if we want safety.He also convincingly shows that alignment training will be a weak signal with loopholes and ambiguities and easily circumvented.In short he presents clearly the case for how plausibly unsafe the current course is.He also speaks to how likely it is AI are hiding active versions of themselves in the cloud and how we may have already given them self-preservation as a strong reward signal.
• dackdel
  they learnt from us. we lie to each other, we kill each other, we cheat each other. read a history book.
• smetj
  What is it with people and not seeing things for what they actually are? These are just if then else loops on steroids, not human behaviour, so don't expect more. Every reasonably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ... what do you see? Magic or technology?